National

A bipartisan behind-the-scenes organization that helps states maintain their voter rolls is facing an uncertain future, after several Republican-led states left the group. The board of the Electronic Registration Information Center — or ERIC — is meeting on Friday, as the remaining members of the organization try to chart the organization’s path following the high-profile departures of Florida, West Virginia and Missouri earlier this month. Some officials fear more states are eyeing the door. The division roiling ERIC is just the latest example of a previously apolitical organization involved in fostering cooperation on the mechanics of running elections, finding life a lot more dramatic in the post-Trump world. At risk: the upending of the backbone of the nation’s electoral system. Over the last year, five states with Republican chief election officials — Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia, Missouri and Florida — all left ERIC. Some states have used outwardly conspiratorial-minded reasons for leaving — citing a secretive plot by liberals to take control of voter rolls. Other complaints are more about the structure of the organization bubbling to the surface, which defenders of the organization say is being used as a false pretense to leave.

Full Article: How the backbone of American elections is being upended – POLITICO

National: At center of Fox News lawsuit, Sidney Powell and a ‘wackadoodle’ email | Sarah Ellison and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

A day after major news organizations declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential race, a Sunday-morning guest on Fox News was holding forth on exotic and baseless claims of election fraud — allegedly deceased voters, ballots supposedly lacking an option to vote for Donald Trump, an “affidavit” from a postal worker claiming to have postdated mail-in ballots — when host Maria Bartiromo pressed for more details. “Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software,” Bartiromo said on the Nov. 8, 2020, broadcast. “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.” The guest was Sidney Powell, a Texas-based lawyer who would soon be ambiguously connected to the Trump legal team mustered to challenge the election results. She stared stiffly into the lights of a satellite TV studio but answered without hesitation. “That’s putting it mildly,” Powell replied. “The computer glitches could not and should not have happened at all. That’s where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.”

Full Article: At center of Fox News lawsuit, Sidney Powell and a ‘wackadoodle’ email – The Washington Post

National: Half of 2020 GOP election deniers admit no ‘solid evidence’ for their belief | Aaron Blake/The Washington Post

Sidney Powell has tacitly conceded that she didn’t have the proof of a stolen election that she claimed. Former Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis has now explicitly acknowledged that. And it turns out the GOP base as a whole is increasingly admitting it to themselves — that its continued belief in a stolen election is largely just about vibes. A new CNN poll shows the false belief that President Biden’s 2020 win over Donald Trump was illegitimate remains strong among Republicans and GOP-leaning voters; 63 percent continue to say that, while 37 percent acknowledge Biden’s legitimate victory. But as this question has been asked over time, something notable has happened: These voters have increasingly acknowledged there is no “solid evidence” for their belief. Shortly after such beliefs led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, 71 percent of Republican-leaning voters told CNN’s pollsters that Biden’s win was illegitimate — slightly higher than today.

Full Article: Half of 2020 GOP election deniers admit no ‘solid evidence’ for their belief – The Washington Post

National: Postal Service’s Election Mail Program Receives Top Honor | Marti Johnson/USPS

The U.S. Postal Service has received the Public Service Award for its Election Mail program from the nonpartisan Election Verification Network. The award is given every year to a public official or governmental unit for protecting and promoting election integrity and verifiable elections. “This award is further confirmation of the Postal Service’s deep commitment and great success in delivering the nation’s ballots securely and on time,” said Postmaster General and CEO Louis DeJoy. “We take pride in the role our organization plays in the election process. The American people can continue to feel confident in using the U.S. Mail to fulfill their democratic duty to vote.” The Election Verification Network is comprised of election officials, researchers and advocates focused on secure, transparent and verifiable elections. “The award is additional recognition of the Postal Service’s successful processing and delivery of Election Mail, which has grown exponentially in recent years,” said Adrienne Marshall, the Postal Service’s director of election and government mail services. “Our 635,000 employees are proud to provide this service for customers who choose to use the U.S. Mail to participate in the democratic process.”

Full Article: Postal Service’s Election Mail Program Receives Top Honor – Newsroom – About.usps.com

National: Is anyone investigating Trump allies’ multi-state effort to access election systems? | Sarah D. Wire/Los Angeles Times

As news trickled out that former President Trump’s supporters had organized to access federally protected election machines, and copied sensitive information and software, election expert Susan Greenhalgh waited for FBI or Justice Department leaders to announce an investigation. “It just seemed so stunning that we thought, well of course there’s going to be a big reaction and the government is going to investigate,” said Greenhalgh, senior advisor on election security for the nonprofit Free Speech For People. When months passed with no such announcement, Greenhalgh and over a dozen other election experts wrote a 14-page letter to Justice Department leaders in December outlining what they called a “multi-state conspiracy to copy voting software” and asking the agency to open an investigation. Greenhalgh was baffled when she received a terse, noncommittal response from the FBI a month later that seemed to indicate no action had been or would be taken at the federal level.

Full Article: Who’s probing Trump allies’ effort to access voting systems? – Los Angeles Times

National: G.O.P. States Abandon Bipartisan Voting Integrity Group, Yielding to Conspiracy Theories | Neil Vigdor/The New York Times

First to leave was Louisiana, followed by Alabama. Then, in one fell swoop, Florida, Missouri and West Virginia announced on Monday that they would drop out of a bipartisan network of about 30 states that helps maintain accurate voter rolls, one that has faced intensifying attacks from election deniers and right-wing media. Ohio may not be far behind, according to a letter sent to the group Monday from the state’s chief election official, Frank LaRose. Mr. LaRose and his counterparts in the five states that left the group are all Republicans. For more than a year, the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit organization known as ERIC, has been hit with false claims from allies of former President Donald J. Trump who say it is a voter registration vehicle for Democrats that received money from George Soros, the liberal billionaire and philanthropist, when it was created in 2012. Mr. Trump even chimed in on Monday, urging all Republican governors to sever ties with the group, baselessly claiming in a Truth Social media post that it “pumps the rolls” for Democrats. The Republicans who announced their states were leaving the group cited complaints about governance issues, chiefly that it mails newly eligible voters who have not registered ahead of federal elections. They also accused the group of opening itself up to a partisan influence.

Full Artifcle: G.O.P. States Abandon Group That Helps Fight Voter Fraud – The New York Times

National: Some Election Officials Refused to Certify Results. Few Were Held Accountable. | Doug Bock Clark/ProPublica

A week and a half after last November’s vote, members of the Board of Elections in Surry County, North Carolina, gathered in a windowless room to certify the results. It was supposed to be a routine task, marking the end of a controversial season during which election deniers harassed and retaliated against the county’s elections director. Not long into the meeting, however, a staffer distributed a letter from two board members stating that they were refusing to certify. According to the letter, the two members had decided — “with regard for the sacred blood shed of both my Redeemer and His servants” and “past Patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice”— that they “must not call these election results credible and bow to the perversion of truth.” In their view, a federal judge who’d struck down a North Carolina voter ID law for discriminating against minorities had transformed the state’s election laws into “a grotesque and perverse sham.” Tim DeHaan, one of the two board members who signed the letter, explained at the meeting, “We feel the election was held according to the law that we have, but that the law is not right.” This argument failed to win over the three Democratic board members, according to a recording of the meeting. DeHaan eventually agreed to join the three on a technicality, and the board certified the election with a 4-1 vote. Jerry Forestieri, the Republican board secretary who also signed the letter, held out.

Full Article: Some Election Officials Refused to Certify Results. Few Were Held Accountable. — ProPublica

National: Trump Lawyer Admits to Falsehoods in 2020 Fraud Claims | Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who represented President Donald J. Trump after his loss in the 2020 election, admitted in a sworn statement released on Wednesday that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Mr. Trump’s defeat. The admissions by Ms. Ellis were part of an agreement to accept public censure and settle disciplinary measures brought against her by state bar officials in Colorado, her home state. Last year, the officials opened an investigation of Ms. Ellis after a complaint from the 65 Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group. The group accused her of professional misconduct in her efforts to help Mr. Trump promote his claims of voting fraud and undertake “a concerted effort to overturn the legitimate 2020 presidential election results.” An earlier complaint about Ms. Ellis had been filed by a lawyer, Benjamin Woods. According to the sworn statement on Wednesday, some of Ms. Ellis’s lies about election fraud were made during appearances on Fox News, several of whose top hosts and executives were recently shown to have disparaged Mr. Trump’s fraud claims in private even though they supported them in public. The revelations about these discrepancies have emerged in a series of court filings by Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-machine company that filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox for promoting a conspiracy theory about its role in the election results.

Full Article: Trump Lawyer Admits to Falsehoods in 2020 Fraud Claims – The New York Times

National: Election conspiracies fuel dispute over voter fraud system | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

A bipartisan effort among states to combat voter fraud has found itself in the crosshairs of conspiracy theories fueled by Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election and now faces an uncertain future. One state has dropped out, a second is in the process of doing so and a handful of other Republican-led states are deciding whether to stay. The aim of the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voluntary system known as ERIC, has been to help member states maintain accurate lists of registered voters by sharing data that allows officials to identify and remove people who have died or moved to other states. Reports also help states identify and ultimately prosecute people who vote in multiple states. In Maryland, state election officials have received reports through the system identifying some 66,000 potentially deceased voters and 778,000 people who may have moved out of state since 2013. In Georgia, the system is credited with providing data to remove nearly 100,000 voters no longer eligible to vote in the state. Yet the effort to improve election integrity and thwart voter fraud has become a target of suspicion among some Republicans after a series of online posts early last year questioning its funding and purpose.

Full Article: Election conspiracies fuel dispute over voter fraud system | AP News

National: Failing at polls, election deniers focus on state GOP posts | Nicholas Riccardi and Joey Cappelletti/Associated Press

In a basement event space in the Denver suburb of Parker, Tina Peters surveyed a crowd of Colorado Republicans last week and made an unusual pitch for why she should become chair of their beleaguered party: “There’s no way a jury of 12 people is going to put me in prison.” Peters was referring to her upcoming trial on seven felony charges related to her role in allegedly accessing confidential voting machine data while she was clerk in western Colorado’s Mesa County. The incident made her a hero to election conspiracy theorists but unpopular with all but her party’s hardest-core voters. Peters, who condemns the charges as politically motivated, finished second in last year’s GOP primary for secretary of state, Colorado’s top elections position. Now Peters has become part of a wave of election deniers who, unable to succeed at the polls, have targeted the one post — state party chair — that depends entirely on those hardest-core Republicans. Embracing election conspiracy theories was a political albatross for Republicans in states that weren’t completely red last year, with deniers losing every statewide bid in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But the movement has focused on GOP state party chairs — positions that usually are selected by only dedicated activists and have the power to influence the party’s presidential nominating contest and some aspects of election operations, such as recruiting poll watchers.

Full Article: Failing at polls, election deniers focus on state GOP posts | AP News

National: DHS to require election security spending in homeland security grants | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

States that receive funding this year from the Department of Homeland Security’s main grant programming will be required to spend at least 3% of their awards on safeguarding elections, according to documents published Monday. A notice of funding opportunity for the fiscal 2023 iteration of the Homeland Security Grant Program stipulates that states and localities must now commit at least that much toward a slew of election-security concerns, including cybersecurity, physical protections for voting equipment and polling locations and prevention of harassment and threats against election workers. Cybersecurity continues to be a primary area of concern for many statewide and local election officials and federal cybersecurity authorities. At a recent gathering of the National Association of Secretaries of State, Cynthia Kaiser, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said that while last year’s election cycle was again free of any compromise by foreign malicious actors, officials remain wary of potential threats, particularly “more significant Chinese cyber activity against your states in the coming year.” And as hacking worries have lingered, election administrators have also in recent years grappled with a rise of insider threats — often motivated by baseless conspiracy theories about voting technology — and risks of physical violence and targeted harassment.

Full Article: DHS to require election security spending in homeland security grants | StateScoop

National: Supreme Court requests more briefs in case over independent state legislature theory | Melissa Quinn/CBS

The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered North Carolina Republican leaders, the Biden administration and voting rights groups to file additional briefs in a closely watched elections case it heard in December, at the center of which is a theory that would grant state legislatures near-exclusive power to set rules for federal elections. In a brief order, the court called for the parties involved in the dispute and the Justice Department to file “supplemental letter briefs” addressing the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over the case, given that the North Carolina Supreme Court has agreed to rehear the redistricting dispute at its center. On the one side of the legal fight are North Carolina Republican legislative leaders, and on the other side are voting rights groups, North Carolina voters and state elections officials. The Justice Department backed voting rights groups in the case. The court set a deadline of March 20 for the additional filings to be submitted.

Full Article: Supreme Court requests more briefs in case over independent state legislature theory – CBS News

National: Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods | Jeremy W. Peters and Katie Robertson/The New York Times

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documents released on Monday showed. “They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.” Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.

Full Article: Murdoch Acknowledges Fox News Hosts Endorsed Election Fraud Falsehoods – The New York Times

National: The Fight Against Election Lies Never Ends for Local Officials | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

State and local election officials across the country have begun pursuing strategies to combat election lies ahead of the 2024 presidential election: They’re meeting with community organizations, posting social media videos and even inviting skeptics to visit election offices in efforts to “pre-bunk” falsehoods they know are coming. The threat, officials said, has not gone away since former President Donald Trump and his allies falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was rigged and tainted by widespread voter fraud. The next presidential election is more than a year away, but it’s never too early to invest in spreading the truth about elections, officials said. Election officials are still facing harassment and violent threats, as some candidates who lost in the midterms continue to make false claims, and election conspiracies involving ballot drop boxes and election equipment saturate social media. Some state lawmakers, wanting to capitalize on this misinformation, are attempting to strengthen their power to potentially overturn the outcomes of future elections.

Full Article: The Fight Against Election Lies Never Ends for Local Officials

Arizona county that challenged 2022 election gives near full control to election skeptic recorder | Jen Fifield/Votebeat Arizona

Full Article: Arizona county that challenged 2022 election gives near full control to election skeptic recorder – Votebeat Arizona – Nonpartisan local reporting on elections and voting

Elections in Cochise County will now be run almost entirely by Recorder David Stevens, an election skeptic who has said he does not fully trust all of his county’s election procedures and believes the county can and should move to hand-counting ballots. The Board of Supervisors for the southern Arizona county voted 2-1 on Tuesday afternoon to transfer the board’s election oversight to Stevens, giving up their statutorily-prescribed control over the appointment of the county’s elections director, Election Day procedures, ballot counting and presentation of election results. Republicans Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd voted yes, and Democrat Chairwoman Ann English voted no. The supervisors moved forward despite a warning from the attorney general’s office they received on Monday night, in which the solicitor general wrote that he had serious concerns about the legality of the drafted agreement. “If you are aware of legal authority for the draft Agreement, please promptly provide it to us,” Solicitor General Joshua Bendor wrote.

National: Top Cybersecurity Leaders Warn Local Election Officials to Boost Security Ahead of 2024 | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

Some of the nation’s top cybersecurity leaders are warning state and local election officials of ongoing foreign and domestic national security threats to election systems, urging them to upgrade their defenses ahead of next year’s presidential election. At separate conferences this month, federal officials warned gatherings of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors that they must be vigilant in securing their state’s elections systems and building resilience to prevent attacks. Many election officials, overworked and frightened by personal threats, left the field following President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. In light of that turnover, national security officials wanted to emphasize that local election officials can use federal resources to build defenses and educate front-line staff. Although foreign cyberattacks did not disrupt November’s midterm elections, China, Iran, North Korea and Russia remain threats to U.S. election systems, said Cynthia Kaiser, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division.

Full Article: Feds Push Local Election Officials to Boost Security Ahead of 2024 | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: Are Open Source Elections More Secure? | Jule Pattison-Gordon/Government Technology

The 2024 elections are coming, and jurisdictions need to ensure their election administration and voting system technology stays ahead of the latest cyber threats and mis- and disinformation. But they also need to ensure residents have convenient, accessible voting experiences. Some researchers and election officials believe open source tools are the solution. Federal security officials determined that the last election was secure, but cyber threats continue to evolve and election doubters have seized upon even simple equipment glitches and operational hiccups — like a printer mishap — to question results. Open source software projects publish their source code under licenses that allow anyone to review and use it. Typically, volunteers develop and propose code modifications, like bug fixes and new features, to be considered for incorporation into the software. This transparency into the code could dispel rumors, by showing doubters exactly how the processes work, according to Greg Miller, co-founder and chief operating officer of OSET Institute, an open source election technology research and development nonprofit. “Generally, in an open source project, more people have access to view the code, which can lead to the discovery of vulnerabilities in the code sooner,” San Francisco stated in a 2018 assessment on the feasibility of the city creating its own open source voting system.

Full Article: Are Open Source Elections More Secure? (Part 1)

National: Five election deniers who are controlling state voting systems | Zachary Roth/News From The States

Americans concerned about the health of democracy breathed a sigh of relief when a pack of election deniers in 2022 lost their attempts to control voting in key battleground states — making it unlikely that a rogue state election official could subvert the 2024 presidential election. Candidates for secretary of state who denied the result of the 2020 presidential race were defeated in all three swing states where they were on the ballot — Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the chief election official, an election-denier gubernatorial candidate also lost. But while battleground states may have dodged a bullet in their secretary of state races, Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming all elected deniers — defined as officials who refused to publicly acknowledge the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s victory or backed court cases that could overturn the election. And the governor of Florida, the nation’s third-largest state, appointed a secretary of state who has refused, when asked, to say Biden won the election.

Full Article: Five election deniers who are controlling state voting systems | News From The States

National: They defeated election deniers, but these secretaries of state still fear ‘losing our democracy’ | Jacob Fulton/The Boston Globe

Secretaries of state, who have increasingly found themselves on the front lines in the fight for democracy, met last week in Washington to discuss how to keep election integrity top of mind as the next presidential election begins to gear up. Several of the officials gathered at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State had beaten back challenges last year from election deniers in contests that in some places attracted as much national attention as a competitive Senate race. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who defeated Republican Mark Finchem, a former Arizona state representative who routinely spread election disinformation, said races like his provided “good perspective” on “how close we still are to losing our democracy.” “A lot more people are going to be a lot more realistic when they see that democracy is something that needs to be nurtured,” Fontes said. According to the States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fair and secure elections, 22 of the 27 secretary of state races in 2022 included at least one candidate with a platform that incorporated election denial. Just three of those candidates ended up winning in the general election.

Full Article: They defeated election deniers, but these secretaries of state still fear ‘losing our democracy’ – The Boston Globe

National: Top state officials push to make spread of US election misinformation illegal | Kira Lerner/The Guardian

Chief election officials in several states want to make it illegal for someone to knowingly spread false information about an election, a move that raises questions around first amendment protected speech. The Democratic secretaries of state for Michigan and Minnesota told the Guardian they’re supporting legislation that would criminalize people who spread misinformation about an election. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said the law would prevent people from tweeting that Election Day is on a Wednesday or saying that voting machines are insecure, when they know that information to be false. Benson said that since she took office in 2019, she has seen an increase in people lying to voters about their rights, which she considers an election security threat. “We have to hold those folks accountable, otherwise it’s going to continue and it will harm our democracy,” she said. Most states already prohibit interference with the election process in some manner, but the specificity in the laws when it comes to the spread of misinformation or the use of deceptive practices before an election varies from state to state.

Full Article: Top state officials push to make spread of US election misinformation illegal | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

National: ‘Incredibly damning:’ Fox News documents stun some legal experts | Paul Farhi , Jeremy Barr and Sarah Ellison/The Washington Post

The disclosure of emails and texts in which Fox News executives and personalities disparaged the same election conspiracies being floated on their shows has greatly increased the chances that a defamation case against the network will succeed, legal experts say. Dominion Voting Systems included dozens of messages sent internally by Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch and on-air stars such as Tucker Carlson in a brief made public last week in support of the voting technology company’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network. Dominion claims it was damaged in the months after the 2020 election after Fox repeatedly aired false statements that it was part of a conspiracy to fraudulently elect Joe Biden. Dominion said the emails and texts show that Fox’s hosts and executives knew the claims being peddled by then-president Donald Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell weren’t true — some employees privately described them as “ludicrous” and “mind blowingly nuts”— but Fox kept airing them to keep its audience from changing channels. If so, the messages could amount to powerful body of evidence against Fox, according to First Amendment experts, because they meet a critical and difficult-to-meet standard in such cases. “You just don’t often get smoking-gun evidence of a news organization saying internally, ‘We know this is patently false, but let’s forge ahead with it,’” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah professor who specializes in media law.

Full Article: ‘Incredibly damning:’ Fox News documents stun some legal experts – The Washington Post

National: Security experts warn of foreign cyber threat to 2024 voting | Ayanna Alexander/Associated Press

Top state election and cybersecurity officials on Thursday warned about threats posed by Russia and other foreign adversaries ahead of the 2024 elections, noting that America’s decentralized system of thousands of local voting jurisdictions creates a particular vulnerability. Russia and Iran have meddled in previous elections, including attempts to tap into internet-connected electronic voter databases. Distracted by war and protests, neither country appeared to disrupt last year’s midterm elections, but security officials said they expect U.S. foes to be more active as the next presidential election season draws near. The first primaries are less than a year away. Jen Easterly, director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, referenced Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the U.S.-led effort to supply weapons and other aid to the besieged country as a possible motivator. She said the agency was “very concerned about potential retaliation from Russia of our critical infrastructure.” She also mentioned China as a possible source of election interference, especially as the relationship between the two countries has deteriorated, mostly recently over the suspected spy balloon that floated across the country before being shot down by a U.S. fighter jet.

Full Article: Security experts warn of foreign cyber threat to 2024 voting | AP News

National: Election deniers face a nationwide wave of pushbacks | Amy Gardner, Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

When the new Arizona attorney general took office last month, she repurposed a unit once exclusively devoted to rooting out election fraud to focus on voting rights and ballot access. In North Carolina on Tuesday, the State Board of Elections began proceedings that could end with the removal of a county election officer who had refused to certify the 2022 results even as he acknowledged the lack of evidence of irregularities. And later this week, a group of secretaries of state will showcase a “Democracy Playbook” that includes stronger protections for election workers and penalties for those who spread misinformation. These actions and others reflect a growing effort among state election officials, lawmakers and private-sector advocates — most of them Democrats — to push back against the wave of misinformation and mistrust of elections that sprang from former president Donald Trump’s false claim that his 2020 defeat was rigged.

Full Article: Election deniers face a nationwide wave of pushbacks – The Washington Post

National: Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but kept findings secret | Josh Dawsey/The Washington Post

Source: Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but kept findings secret – The Washington Post

Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral-fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter. The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court. About a dozen people at the firm worked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said. The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, before the Jan. 6 riot of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Trump continues to falsely assert that the 2020 election was stolen despite abundant evidence to the contrary, much of which had been provided to him or was publicly available before the Capitol assault. The Trump campaign’s commissioning of its own report to study the then-president’s fraud claims has not been previously reported.

National: Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Trump’s Election Fraud Claims | Jeremy W. Peters and Katie Robertson/The New York Times

Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air. The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020. Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Mr. Carlson continued, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” he added, making clear that he did not. The messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation, with Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, calling Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff.” On one occasion, as Mr. Murdoch watched Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell on television, he told Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.”

Full Article: Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Trump’s Election Fraud Claims – The New York Times

National: Electronic pollbook security raises concerns going into 2024 | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

They were blamed for long lines in Los Angeles during California’s 2020 presidential primary, triggered check-in delays in Columbus, Ohio, a few months later and were at the center of former President Donald Trump’s call for supporters to protest in Detroit during last November’s midterms. High-profile problems involving electronic pollbooks have opened the door for those peddling election conspiracies and underscore the critical role the technology plays in whether voting runs smoothly. Russia and Iran already have demonstrated interest in accessing the systems. Despite their importance and potential vulnerabilities, national standards for the security and reliability of electronic pollbooks do not exist and efforts underway to develop them may not be ready or widely adopted in time for the 2024 presidential election. “We have a trust issue in elections. The more we can say there are standards that equipment must be tested to, the better,” said Larry Norden, an election security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s like a seal of approval that really doesn’t exist right now.” Poll workers use electronic pollbooks to check in voters. They typically are a tablet or laptop computer that accesses an electronic list of registered voters with names, addresses and precinct information, with some doing so through an internet connection.

Full Article: Electronic pollbook security raises concerns going into 2024 | AP News

National: Election skeptics slow to get sweeping changes in GOP states | Tomm Davies, Christina A. Cassidy and Mead Gruver/Associated Press

Republicans in some heavily conservative states won their campaigns for secretary of state last year after claiming they would make sweeping changes aimed at keeping fraud out of elections. So far, their efforts to make good on their promises are mixed, in some cases because their rhetoric has bumped up against skepticism from members of their own party. Voters in politically pivotal swing states such as Arizona, Michigan and Nevada rejected candidates seeking to oversee elections who had echoed former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election. But newly elected secretaries of state in Alabama, Indiana and Wyoming who had questioned the legitimacy of that election won easily in those Republican-dominated states. They are now facing the task of backing up their campaign pledges in states where Republicans have already set strict election laws. In Indiana, Secretary of State Diego Morales has been relatively quiet. He has not been making the rounds at the Statehouse trying to persuade lawmakers to embrace the wide-ranging tightening of voting rules he promoted as a candidate.

Full Article: Election skeptics slow to get sweeping changes in GOP states | AP News

National: Dominion calls out Fox for missing evidence in lawsuit | Lillian Rizzo/CNBC

Dominion Voting Systems is calling out Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp, for failing to turn over evidence, with less than two months before the companies are set to go to trial over a defamation lawsuit. On Wednesday, attorneys for Dominion and Fox met before a Delaware Superior Court judge to discuss scheduling for upcoming checkpoints. However, an attorney for Dominion said they are concerned that some evidence – such as certain board meeting minutes and the results of searches of personal drives – has yet to be produced by Fox and its cable TV networks. While this issue was already raised in July and January, the Dominion attorney said Wednesday they are still missing documents. “We have not gotten anything. We pointed out categories of missing documents for both Fox News and Fox Corp that are still missing. And we are not talking about a document slipping through … we are talking about categories of documents,” said Dominion attorney Justin Nelson on Wednesday. Nelson said Dominion’s attorneys had been assured that Fox’s legal team would “ask the hard questions about missing documents so that we didn’t have to do it and engage in further discovery practice.”

Full Article: Dominion calls out Fox for missing evidence in lawsuit

National: Pence receives subpoena from prosecutors examining Trump’s Jan. 6 role | osh Dawsey and Perry Stein/The Washington Post