National

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

Former vice president Mike Pence received a subpoena from the special counsel investigating key aspects of the sprawling probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, according to a person familiar with the matter. Jack Smith — the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead the day-to-day operations of the investigation — is also heading a separate criminal probe into Trump’s possible mishandling of classified documents at his Florida home. The Pence subpoena is related to Jan. 6, according to the person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The subpoena comes after months of negotiations between the Justice Department and Pence. ABC News first reported news of the subpoena. A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment. A spokesman for Pence also declined to comment.

Full Article: Pence receives subpoena from prosecutors examining Trump’s Jan. 6 role – The Washington Post

National: Election officials say democracy is still at risk in 2024: ‘The gun is still loaded’ | Jane C. Timm/NBC

The November midterms gave election officials and pro-democracy advocates their first sigh of relief in years: The election system they’d spent years defending and shoring up operated almost seamlessly, and most of the election deniers who threatened to disrupt it were defeated. … “The extreme rhetoric is not stopping,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, a group that led the charge in battleground states against election denialism. “It just led to a little girl having bullets shoot through her wall in New Mexico because someone was mad at her mom because they thought that she rigged an election, right? I really do not think we’re out of the woods.” Election experts, pro-democracy advocates and secretaries of state who defeated election deniers said in interviews that while democracy defenders have won a key battle, the existential threat to American democracy remains. “In some ways, it was just a dress rehearsal for the 2024 presidential election,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said. In November, he defeated Republican Kim Crockett, a Trump-endorsed candidate who said the 2020 election was rigged.

Full Article: Election officials say democracy is still at risk in 2024

National: Election officials ready themselves for the next wave of Trump followers | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Hundreds of local election officials across the country are about to confront a political challenge putting their management skills and their campaign chops to the test: Administering the 2024 presidential vote while running for reelection themselves. Donald Trump acolytes galvanized by the former president’s false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from him piled into last year’s campaigns for state election officer positions. And although Democrats and mainstream Republicans defeated all of those candidates in key battleground states like Michigan, Arizona and elsewhere, far more races for local election positions there and in other states will be up for grabs next year. The slate of below-the-radar campaigns will test how much money and attention will be available for these critical roles in the midst of a presidential race. “The concerns about being primaried is absolutely on the mind of very dedicated and very middle-of-the-road, nonpartisan-functioning” election officials in Florida, said Mark Earley, the election supervisor in Leon County, Fla., a blue-leaning county in the state’s deep-red Panhandle.

Full Article: Election officials ready themselves for the next wave of Trump followers – POLITICO

National: Elections Stayed Secure in 2022, but Trouble Could Return in 2024 | Carl Smith/Governing

Brianna Lennon, the clerk for Boone County, Mo., works in a state where harassment and threats have not escalated to the point that local election officials fear for their safety. That doesn’t mean her office doesn’t get calls from voters who are angry about election results, just that they are likely to be upset about outcomes in other states. Lennon, who co-hosts a national podcast on election administration, is hearing more and more about security worries. “It’s really dominating the conversation amongst election officials,” she says. “It used to be that we just talked about cybersecurity, but now we talk about physical safety.” Midterm elections were free of the election-related violence some had feared. In part, this may have been a consequence of federal investigations in response to events on Jan. 6, which have resulted in charges against almost 1,000 individuals, including leaders of groups promoting violence.

Full Article: Elections Stayed Secure in 2022, but Trouble Could Return in 2024

National: Election-denying lawmakers hold key election oversight roles | Marc Levy and Jonathan Cooper/Associated Press

Republican lawmakers who have spread election conspiracy theories and falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential outcome was rigged are overseeing legislative committees charged with setting election policy in two major political battleground states. Divided government in Pennsylvania and Arizona means that any voting restrictions those GOP legislators propose is likely to fail. Even so, the high-profile appointments give the lawmakers a platform to cast further doubt on the integrity of elections in states that will be pivotal in selecting the next president in 2024. Awarding such plum positions to lawmakers who have repeated conspiracies and spread misinformation cuts against more than two years of evidence showing there were no widespread problems or fraud in the last presidential election. It also would appear to run counter to the message delivered in the November midterm elections, when voters rejected election-denying candidates running for top offices in presidential battleground states. At the same time, many mainstream Republicans are trying to move past the lies told by former President Donald Trump and his allies about his loss to President Joe Biden.

Full Article: Election-denying lawmakers hold key election oversight roles | AP News

National: GOP report shows plan to ramp up focus on disproven election fraud claims | Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf/The Washington Post

A new internal report prepared by the Republican National Committee proposes creating a permanent infrastructure in every state to ramp up “election integrity” activities in response to perceptions within GOP ranks of widespread fraud and abuse in the way the country selects its leaders. The report, prepared by the RNC’s “National Election Integrity Team” and obtained by The Washington Post, reveals the degree to which Republicans continue to trade on former president Donald Trump’s false claims that Democrats and their allies rigged his defeat in 2020. The report suggests building a massive new party organization involving state-level “election integrity officers” and intensive new training models for poll workers and observers — all based on unsubstantiated claims that Democrats have implemented election procedures that allow for rigged votes. Yet the report also acknowledges that the GOP’s obsession with election fraud has cost the party, most notably in 2021, when mistrust in elections contributed to a drop in Republican turnout in two U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia, costing the party its Senate majority.

Full Article: GOP report shows plan to ramp up focus on disproven election fraud claims – The Washington Post

National: States Push for New Voting Laws With an Eye Toward 2024 | Neil Vigdor/The New York Times

January 20, 2023

The tug of war over voting rights and rules is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats fight to get new laws on the books before the 2024 presidential election. Republicans have pushed to tighten voting laws with renewed vigor since former President Donald J. Trump made baseless claims of fraud after losing the 2020 election, while Democrats coming off midterm successes are trying to channel their momentum to expand voting access and thwart efforts to undermine elections. States like Florida, Texas and Georgia, where Republicans control the levers of state government, have already passed sweeping voting restrictions that include criminal oversight initiatives, limits on drop boxes, new identification requirements and more. While President Biden and Democrats in Congress were unable to pass federal legislation last year that would protect voting access and restore elements of the landmark Voting Rights Act stripped away by the Supreme Court in 2013, not all reform efforts have floundered.

Full Article: States Push for New Voting Laws With an Eye Toward 2024 – The New York Times

National: Election Assistance Commission Appoints New Director With Security-Focused Background | Edward Graham/Nextgov

January 20, 2023

The Election Assistance Commission on Tuesday announced that Steven Frid—the security director at the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office—has been appointed as the new executive director of the agency beginning on Jan. 30. In a press release, EAC called Frid “a long-term public servant who has dedicated his career to collecting and analyzing data about risks to federal employees, facilities, information and operations within the Office of Personnel Management, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education.” “Steven Frid will be joining the EAC during a very exciting and pivotal time for the agency as we prepare for the 2024 elections,” EAC Chairman Thomas Hicks, Vice Chair Christy McCormick, and Commissioners Ben Hovland and Donald Palmer said in a joint statement. “His leadership, innovative work and expertise at a range of federal agencies will be an asset as the EAC continues to grow and work to better serve election officials, voters and other stakeholders.”

Full Article: Election Assistance Commission Appoints New Director With Security-Focused Background – Nextgov

National: GOP action on mail ballot timelines angers military families | Julie Carr Smith and Gary Fields/Los Angeles Times

January 20, 2023

Ohio’s restrictive new election law significantly shortens the window for mailed ballots to be received — despite no evidence that the extended timeline has led to fraud or any other problems — and that change is angering active-duty members of the military and their families because of its potential to disenfranchise them. The pace of ballot counting after election day has become a target of conservatives egged on by former President Trump. He has promoted a false narrative since losing the 2020 election that fluctuating results as late-arriving mail-in ballots are tallied is a sign of fraud. Republican lawmakers said during debate on the Ohio legislation that even if Trump’s claims aren’t true, the skepticism they have caused among conservatives about the accuracy of election results justifies imposing new limits. The new law reduces the number of days for county election boards to include mailed ballots in their tallies from 10 days after election day to four. Critics say that could lead to more ballots from Ohio’s military voters missing the deadline and getting tossed. This issue isn’t confined to Ohio. Three other states narrowed their post-election windows for accepting mail ballots last session, according to data from the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab. Similar moves pushed by Republican lawmakers are being proposed or discussed this year in Wisconsin, New Jersey, California and other states.

Full Article: GOP action on mail ballot timelines angers military families – Los Angeles Times

National: Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – report | Kira Lerner/The Guardian

January 13, 2023

The Republican party filed a record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022, a sign it is shifting the battle over voting access and election administration to courtrooms as well as state legislatures. Last year, Republican party groups filed 23 democracy-related lawsuits, according to a new report by Democracy Docket, a progressive media platform that tracks voting litigation. The lawsuits included efforts to challenge election results, attacks on mail-in voting and attempts to undermine the administration of elections. The Democratic party, the report found, filed only six voting lawsuits in 2022 and all sought to protect or expand the right to vote. The almost two dozen lawsuits filed by the GOP is an increase from 20 in 2020, the year of the presidential election in which Donald Trump’s loss was contested in courts for months. There were no new lawsuits by the Republican party in 2021, when there was no major election. “Evidently, the GOP establishment is becoming more litigious than ever and is turning to courts to achieve its anti-voting and anti-democracy ends,” the report says.

Full Article: Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – report | Republicans | The Guardian

National: Another ‘radical’ change to the Voting Rights Act could reach the Supreme Court | Tierney Sneed/CNN

January 13, 2023

A federal appeals court appears open to further shrinking the scope of the Voting Rights Act in a case that could lead to another major Supreme Court showdown over voting rights. The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals at a hearing on Wednesday considered whether private entities – and not just the US Justice Department – can bring lawsuits under a key provision of the law. Two of the three members of the appellate panel asked questions suggesting they were leaning against the idea that the provision, known as Section 2, could be enforced with private lawsuits. If those seeking a narrowing of the VRA are successful, it would significantly diminish the use of the law to challenge ballot regulations and redistricting maps that are said to be racially discriminatory. A vast majority of the cases that are brought under the Voting Rights Act – which prohibits election rules that have the intent or effect of discriminating on the basis of race – are brought by private plaintiffs, with the Justice Department facing strained resources and other considerations that limit the number of VRA cases it files to, at most, a few each year. Last year, however, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas – running counter to decades of legal practice – said that private parties do not have the ability to sue under the Section 2.

Full Article: Voting Rights Act: Another ‘radical’ change could reach the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

New York: Officials urged to modernize state’s election systems | Rick Reisman/State of Politics

January 13, 2023

Making it easier to register to vote and obtain an absentee ballot, funding a system of publicly financed campaigns and launching automatic voter registration are among the measures New York officials are being urged to focus on to strengthen the state’s voting infrastructure. The Brennan Center and a coalition of advocacy organizations in a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul and top lawmakers in the state Legislature called for a package of changes, some of which are being implemented this year, in order to bolster faith in voting in the state. The push for the measures comes as state lawmakers this week began the 2023 legislative session in Albany, and after legal challenges were made during last year’s election season to absentee ballots. “Last year, we witnessed a disturbing increase nationwide in election denialism, threats against election workers, and voter intimidation,” the groups wrote in the letter. “New York was no exception.”

Full Article: Officials urged to modernize New York’s election systems

National: Advocates seek federal investigation of multistate effort to copy voting software | mma Brown , Aaron C. Davis and Jon Swaine/The Washington Post

An effort by supporters of former president Donald Trump to copy sensitive voting software in multiple states after the 2020 election deserves attention from the federal government, including a criminal investigation and assessment of the risk posed to election security, according to election-security advocates. As new information about the multistate effort continues to emerge, the national election and campaign-finance reform group Free Speech for People, along with several former election officials and computer scientists, sent a letter Monday urging the Justice and Homeland Security departments to investigate. They wrote that by copying voting software and circulating it “in the wild,” partisan election deniers have created a digital road map that could help hackers alter election results or disrupt voting. Evidence of the multistate effort was unearthed by plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit over the security of Georgia’s voting system. They found that as Trump falsely blamed his 2020 defeat on hacked voting machines, sympathetic officials in rural Coffee County, Ga., allowed computer-forensics experts, paid by a nonprofit run by Trump-allied attorney Sidney Powell, to copy voting software in January 2021. That software was then uploaded to a website, from where it was downloaded by election deniers across the country. “Because these events were revealed in a private lawsuit rather than through a law enforcement investigation, the significance and consequences may not have registered with the relevant federal agencies,” reads the letter. Several of its 15 signatories have served as experts for the plaintiffs in the case.

Full Article: Advocates seek federal investigation of multistate effort to copy voting software – The Washington Post

National: Center for Security in Politics Working Group Releases Statement on Developing Standards for Internet Ballot Return | Recent News | University of California, Berkeley

Full Article: CSP Working Group Releases Statement on Developing Standards for Internet Ballot Return | Goldman School of Public Policy | University of California, Berkeley

Technology is still too limited, and the security risks too great to establish responsible standards for voting via the internet at this time, a Center for Security in Politics working group announced. Made up of a non-partisan group of experts from politics, election administration, academia, and technology, the working group was charged with determining the kinds of technical and implementation standards needed to ensure safe and secure internet ballot return. The group was convened with funding from Tusk Philanthropies. “Internet ballot return has the potential to serve voters experiencing barriers to more traditional forms of voting,” said Mike Garcia, a cybersecurity and election security expert who chaired the working group. “It could also be valuable in the event of broad disruptions like wildfires or floods. But current technology cannot provide the level of security needed for widespread use in public elections—at least not yet.” “We are living through a time of intense skepticism about elections when the very foundations of the democratic process are under threat,” said CSP director and former homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano. “It is imperative that voting accessibility be balanced with security, transparency, and equity. The working group brought their expertise to bear on this important topic, and I thank them for their service.”

National: Election Deniers Were Defeated in 2022, But May Run Again in 2024 | Ryan Teague Beckwith/Bloomberg

An all-out offensive by activists and state officials against election denial scored major successes in clamping down on the “stop the steal” movement in 2022, amid continued attempts to undermine free and fair elections in the US. Advocacy groups spent millions on ads against candidates who adhered to Donald Trump’s false claims that he lost due to widespread fraud and were running to oversee voting in presidential battlegrounds or lead them as governors. Local and state elections administrators coordinated with law enforcement to ensure that polling places remained safe. In the end, though, it was voters who had the biggest impact, rejecting election deniers for governor and secretary of state in five key states, re-electing officials who defied Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss and backing ballot measures to make it easier to vote and harder to challenge fair and accurate results. But an even bigger challenge will come in the high-stakes 2024 presidential election.

Full Article: Election Deniers Were Defeated in 2022, But May Run Again in 2024 – Bloomberg

National: Special counsel has subpoenaed officials in all 7 states targeted by Trump allies in 2020 election | Zachary Cohen and Sara Murray/CNN

Special counsel Jack Smith has issued a subpoena to local officials in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, for information related to the 2020 election, a spokesperson for the county told CNN. “Yes, we received a subpoena from the Department of Justice’s special counsel regarding the 2020 election. We have nothing further to share or provide,” said Amie Downs, the county’s communications director. The subpoena sent to Allegheny County is the latest in a string of requests for information sent by Smith, who is now overseeing the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Smith’s team has now sent subpoenas to local and state officials in all seven of the key states – Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – targeted by former President Donald Trump Trump and his allies as part of their bid to upend Joe Biden’s legitimate victory.

Full Article: Special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed officials in all 7 states targeted by Trump allies in 2020 election | CNN Politics

National: Report: threat of election subversion eased, but not ended | David Meyers/The Fulcrum

Even though many of the “election deniers” who sought influential positions in state government this year were defeated, the threat to democracy has not subsided, according to the latest report from a trio of organizations seeking to protect the system. Given the election results, the states that pose the greatest risk to free and fair elections are Florida, North Carolina and Texas, according to the States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy and Law Forward. Those groups released the latest version of their joint report, “A Democracy Crisis in the Making: How State Legislatures are Politicizing, Criminalizing, and Interfering with Elections,” on Wednesday. “As Americans, we may disagree on a lot of things, but we can all agree that voters — not election denying officials — should choose our elected leaders,” said Rachel Homer, counsel with Protect Democracy. “At ballot boxes across the country, American voters made clear: they don’t want politicians who attack and undermine our elections to be running their states. This is a big win for our democracy. But in some state legislatures, the election denial fever hasn’t not broken. The threat is still very real and we can’t afford to ignore it.” Both Florida and Texas are in the high-risk category because the report identifies the states’ senior officials – governors, attorneys general, secretaries of state – the legislative majorities have all embraced former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Those two states have also been at the forefront of legislative activity tightening voting rules.

Full Article: Report: threat of election subversion eased, but not ended – The Fulcrum

Was Election Denial Just a Passing Threat? Or is it here to stay? | Blake Hounshell/The New York Times

In the months before the midterm elections, a reporter for Time magazine asked Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, why he was so convinced that Donald Trump had won the state in 2020 despite all evidence to the contrary. “It strains credibility,” Finchem responded. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?” It was as succinct an explanation as any for why so many Americans believed the 2020 election had been stolen. Republicans, especially those living in deep-red areas, knew so few Democrats that it beggared their imagination that anyone, as Finchem put it, would vote for one. Now, two political scientists have put some rigor behind this idea. The more that voters were surrounded by other Republicans, Nicholas Clark and Rolfe Daus Peterson of Susquehanna University report in a forthcoming research paper, the more likely that they were to say that the 2020 election had been stolen, controlling for other factors.

Full Article: Was Election Denial Just a Passing Threat? – The New York Times

National: Midterms free of feared chaos as voting experts look to 2024 | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

Election Day, anxiety mounted over potential chaos at the polls. Election officials warned about poll watchers who had been steeped in conspiracy theories falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Democrats and voting rights groups worried about the effects of new election laws, in some Republican-controlled states, that President Joe Biden decried as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Law enforcement agencies were monitoring possible threats at the polls. Yet Election Day, and the weeks of early voting before it, went fairly smoothly. There were some reports of unruly poll watchers disrupting voting, but they were scattered. Groups of armed vigilantes began watching over a handful of ballot drop boxes in Arizona until a judge ordered them to stay far away to ensure they would not intimidate voters. And while it might take months to figure out their full impact, GOP-backed voting laws enacted after the 2020 election did not appear to cause major disruptions the way they did during the March primary in Texas. “The entire ecosystem in a lot of ways has become more resilient in the aftermath of 2020,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director who advises a number of voting rights organizations. “There’s been a lot of effort on ensuring things went well.”

Full Article: Midterms free of feared chaos as voting experts look to 2024 | AP News

National: Local Officials Across US Still Trying to Subvert 2022 Vote | Ryan Teague Beckwith and Sarah Holder/Bloomberg

Some local officials in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania defied state elections laws as they pushed debunked claims about the November midterms, a disturbing trend that could spell trouble in 2024. The incidents, most of which were rebuffed or ended when the officials backed down, show that despite losses for dozens of candidates who worked to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory, GOP officials are still trying to toy with electoral defeats. “What we’re seeing now is the beginning of the same playbook that could be used in 2024,” said Matthew Seligman, a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford University. The Board of Supervisors in rural Cochise County, Arizona, refused to certify the November elections, leading the secretary of state and an advocacy group to sue. The Board of Elections in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, was initially deadlocked on whether to report their tallies to the state. Officials in Nye County, Nevada, repeatedly attempted to hand-count all ballots even as the state Supreme Court tried to stop them, only to give up and use the voting machines for their official count.

Full Article: Local Officials Across US Still Trying to Subvert 2022 Vote – Bloomberg

National: Manchin and Klobuchar: Omnibus likely place for electoral count overhaul | Jim Saksa/Roll Call

Legislation to overhaul how Congress counts presidential electoral votes should hop on the must-pass spending omnibus on its way out of the Senate, Sens. Joe Manchin III and Amy Klobuchar said Wednesday. Speaking at a National Council on Election Integrity event, Manchin said the Electoral Count Reform Act was “ready.”“I would thin k the omnibus bill is the appropriate place to put it,” the West Virginia Democrat said. Speaking later, Klobuchar, who chairs the Senate Rules Committee, said the National Defense Authorization Act was another option, but “the omnibus is looking more and more promising.” “That’s coming out of the meeting at the White House,” the Minnesota Democrat added. She said Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer is “hopeful.” Manchin and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine hashed out the bipartisan bill over the summer in an ad hoc committee of senators before handing the bill over to Klobuchar’s committee in September. Collins told reporters Tuesday that she was worried about finding time in the lame duck to pass the legislation.

Full Article: Manchin and Klobuchar: Omnibus likely place for electoral count overhaul – Roll Call

National: Election security a success, but more improvements needed, experts say | Ines Kagubare/The Hill