National

Voters rejected election deniers across the country last week. But they did so with particular verve along the Great Lakes. In Minnesota, the Democratic secretary of state defeated by a 10-point margin a Republican challenger who baselessly called the 2020 election rigged and pushed for restricting early voting. In Wisconsin, voters handed Gov. Tony Evers (D) a second term, declining to reward a candidate backed by former president Donald Trump who left open the possibility of trying to reverse the last presidential election. In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) crushed Republican Doug Mastriano, who had highlighted his willingness to decertify voting machines if he won the governorship. But perhaps the biggest statement on democracy came in Michigan, where voters by large margins rebuffed a slate of Republican election deniers running for governor, attorney general and secretary of state. They also embraced an amendment to the state constitution that expands voting rights and makes it much more difficult for officials to subvert the will of voters. In the process, they flipped the legislature with the help of new legislative maps drawn by a nonpartisan commission, giving Democrats complete control of state government for the first time in 40 years.

Full Article: Election deniers face especially stiff rebuke in Great Lakes states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – The Washington Post

National: Fact Check – WiFi access inside a polling place is not proof of election fraud | Reuters

Access to WiFi inside a polling place is not automatic proof of voter fraud, despite claims made online, experts told Reuters. Text circulated online ahead of the U.S. midterm elections urging voters to monitor the WiFi access outside a polling station and when inside, checking again to ensure no additional WiFi network was detectable. The post led to claims that a new WiFi network suddenly appearing from inside a polling station can lead to voter fraud. “If you find any new wifi networks that do not belong, please email your County and State Board of Elections with the name of that wifi network. Ask them to investigate,” a section of the text reads. One individual who shared the claim on Twitter said: “PROVE VOTER FRAUD WIFI !!” (here). Examples of the claim online can be found (here), (here) and (here). But the presence of a WiFi network inside a polling place is not automatic proof of nefarious activity, experts in election security told Reuters. “Network availability isn’t generally a cause for concern or proof that machines are connected to the internet,” David Levine, an elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy – German Marshall Fund, told Reuters. “WiFi networks are everywhere,” Juan E. Gilbert, chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering department at the University of Florida, told Reuters. “In fact, people can carry WiFi networks with them via their phones or jetpacks, etc. As such, the presence of a WiFi network in a voting area is not an immediate concern. It is not proof that machines are connected to the internet,” Gilbert added.

Full Article: Fact Check-WiFi access inside a polling place is not proof of election fraud | Reuters

National: Lawmakers advance bill to make mail voting more transparent | Camdyn Bruce/The Hill

The House Oversight and Reform Committee advanced a measure on Thursday to make it easier to track mail-in ballots for federal elections. The Vote by Mail Tracking Act requires that all mailed ballots include a U.S. Postal Service barcode that enables tracking of each individual ballot, as well as meeting other requirements for envelope design and bear an official election mail logo. Mailed ballots have been thrust into the political spotlight during the COVID-19 pandemic, with millions of Americans choosing to vote from home. The 2020 general election saw record numbers of mail votes cast, and voting by mail remained popular in this year’s midterms. According to NBC, over 47 million people voted early in the 2022 midterms with 55 percent of them choosing to cast their ballot by mail.

Full Article: Lawmakers advance bill to make mail voting more transparent | The Hill

National: Former CISA director praises government’s role in election security | Ines Kagubare/The Hill

Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said the government and elections officials did a “good job” at securing the midterm elections and communicating with voters on what is accurate information. Krebs, who spoke on Wednesday at an annual cyber summit in New York hosted by the Aspen Institute, said the key is to effectively convey accurate information and debunk misinformation and disinformation narratives ahead of elections. “You can do all this stuff in the background, but you have to continue to communicate, communicate, communicate on what is happening and what [voters] should be thinking about as information is teed up,” Krebs said. “The key here is that the prebunking is dependent on identifying the potential areas that could be exploited,” he added. In 2020, CISA created a page on its website called the Rumor Control which debunks common misinformation and disinformation narratives. Testifying before a House panel in April, CISA Director Jen Easterly told lawmakers that the website provides accurate information regarding the election, including facts about absentee ballots, so that voters “have the information they need to maintain confidence in the integrity of elections.”

Full Article: Former CISA director praises government’s role in election security | The Hill

National: Lengthy vote counts frustrate, but don’t signal problems | Christina A. Cassidy and Julie Carr Smyth/Associated Press

Four days after Election Day, with a bitter, high-profile race for Arizona governor still up in the air, Ohio’s secretary of state broke an unspoken protocol among top election officials. “Dear Arizona, need some advice on how to run an election the right way?” Frank LaRose, a Republican, chided his counterparts on Twitter. “Your process is obviously not working.” Though not as fast as most would like, the process actually was working as designed and as it has for years in a state where the vast majority of voters cast mailed ballots. What’s different is that many of the races were so close that winners couldn’t be quickly determined, a frustration that has become more common as Arizona has evolved into one of the nation’s most hotly contested political battlegrounds. The governor’s race eventually was called for the Democrat, Katie Hobbs, four days after LaRose sent his social media blast — with about 17,000 votes separating the candidates out of more than 2.5 million cast. Arizona isn’t the only state where votes were still being counted a week later. Even in Ohio, where the margins for Republican candidates were wide enough for all top races to be called on election night, counties were still tallying late-arriving mailed, military and overseas ballots nearly a week after Election Day. One state legislative race had yet to be called.

Full Article: Lengthy vote counts frustrate, but don’t signal problems | AP News

National: Election Officials Say Efforts to Bolster the Voting System Worked | Alexandra Berzon and Ken Bensinger/New York Times

For months, election officials have worried that activists convinced that the election system is corrupt and broken would cause significant problems in the midterms. But the scattered episodes during the vote did not disrupt the system. The relative calm so far had election officials breathing a sigh of relief, even as they remained concerned about specious legal challenges and misinformation that could erupt in the coming weeks. They praised tactics they believe reinforced a system that was rocked by the baseless claims of fraud and widespread distrust after Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. They pointed to better and more frequent communication by elections officials, and transparency measures such as live cams at ballot boxes and in counting rooms. Some speculated that polling and right-wing media reports promising a Republican blowout in races across the country may have discouraged some right-wing activists from provocations at polling places. “It was remarkably smooth,” said Damon Circosta, the chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. “You can tell by my giddiness I was not expecting that.”

Full Article: Election Officials Say Efforts to Bolster the Voting System Worked – The New York Times

Voting Glitches, Website Attack Trigger Election Day Misinformation | Gopal Ratnam/Government Technology

A technical glitch in vote tabulation machines in Arizona and an attempted takedown of voter-facing websites in Mississippi led to a surge of misinformation about broken systems, but the setbacks largely didn’t affect voting or counting on Election Day. In Arizona’s Maricopa County — the state’s largest — dozens of vote tabulation machines malfunctioned on Tuesday, affecting about 20 percent of polling places. The machines were fixed by late afternoon, but state officials said that did not prevent voters from casting their ballots. In Mississippi, some election-related websites that provide information to voters faced an attack because of a sudden increase in volume of traffic, typically a sign of a distributed denial-of-service attack, known as DDoS. State officials said the websites were not compromised and didn’t affect any internal election processes. A Russian hacking group claimed on the messaging platform Telegram that it had targeted Mississippi, USA Today reported, citing messages it had seen on the platform. The glitches fed an online disinformation campaign by former President Donald Trump and his Republican supporters, who alleged that the machine malfunction in Arizona was an attempt to disenfranchise Republican voters.

Full Article: Voting Glitches, Website Attack Trigger Election Day Misinformation

National: Trump called a protest. No one showed. Why GOP efforts to cry foul fizzled this time. | Rosalind S. Helderman , Patrick Marley and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

As voters cast ballots largely without incident on Tuesday afternoon, former president Donald Trump took to social media to declare that a minor, already rectified problem with absentee balloting in Detroit was “REALLY BAD.” “Protest, protest, protest,” he wrote just before 2:30 p.m. Unlike in 2020, when similar cries from the then-president drew thousands of supporters into the streets — including to a tabulating facility in Detroit and later to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — this time, no one showed up. After two years of promises from Trump and his supporters that they would flood polls and counting stations with partisan watchers to spot alleged fraud, after unprecedented threats lodged against election workers, after calls to ditch machines in favor of hand counting and after postings on internet chat groups called for violent action to stop supposed cheating, a peaceful Election Day drew high turnout and only scattered reports of problems.

Full Article: Why the midterms saw only muted GOP claims of alleged election fraud – The Washington Post

National: Key election deniers concede defeat after disputing Trump’s 2020 loss | Emma Brown and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

Voters in several battleground states have rebuked state-level candidates who echoed former president Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential race was rigged, keeping election deniers in those places from positions with power over the certification of future presidential election results. In a number of cases, the losing candidates conceded their races Wednesday, opting not to follow a precedent that Trump had set and that scholars had feared could become a troubling new norm of American democracy. But even as those candidates bowed to reality, dozens of others who denied or questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 vote were celebrating projected wins in congressional races. At least 145 Republican election deniers running for the House had won their races as of Wednesday afternoon, ticking past the 139 House Republicans who objected to the counting of electoral votes following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Full Article: Key election deniers concede defeat after disputing Trump’s 2020 loss – The Washington Post

National: How Concessions Are Making a Modest But Notable Comeback in 2022 | Glenn Thrush/The New York Times

Several bitterly contested races remain undecided, but by Wednesday it was becoming clear that the 2022 midterm campaign had spawned a modest and somewhat unexpected national political comeback — by civility. Vanquished candidates from both parties have offered dignified concessions, two years after President Donald J. Trump refused to acknowledge the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr., which emboldened some of his followers to question the legitimacy of elections, and eschew healing rituals in their aftermath. This year, many defeated Republicans — including some endorsed by the former president and many who embraced his lies about the last national election — accepted their losses with magnanimity, rejecting the Trumpian example without mentioning him by name. “This morning I called John Fetterman and congratulated him,” Mehmet Oz, who lost the Senate race in Pennsylvania, wrote in a statement on Wednesday.

Full Article: How Concessions Are Making a Modest But Notable Comeback in 2022 – The New York Times

National: Future of American democracy loomed large in voters’ minds | Gary Fields and Nuha Dolby/Associated Press

This week’s ballot had an unspoken candidate — American democracy. Two years of relentless attacks on democratic traditions by former President Donald Trump and his allies left the country’s future in doubt, and voters responded. Many of the candidates who supported the lie that Trump won the 2020 election lost races that could have put them in position to influence future elections. But the conditions that threatened democracy’s demise remain, and Americans view them from very different perspectives, depending on their politics. In New Hampshire, voters reelected Republican Gov. Chris Sununu to a fourth term but rejected three congressional candidates who were either endorsed by Trump or aligned themselves with the former president. Instead, voters sent Democratic incumbents back to Washington. Bill Greiner, a restaurant owner and community bank founder, said the Trump candidates won their Republican primaries by “owning the crazy lane” and then provided an easy playbook for Democrats in the general election. Greiner, a Republican, said in past years he has fallen in line behind GOP nominees when his preferred candidates lost primaries, but he couldn’t vote for candidates who continued to deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

Full Article: Future of American democracy loomed large in voters’ minds | AP News

National: Fears and Suspicion Hang Over Voting on Cusp of Election Day | Nick Corasaniti and Charles Homans/The New York Times

For the vast majority of the 40 million Americans who have already voted in the midterm elections, the process was smooth and unremarkable. But the broad view belies signs of strain: A court ordered armed activists to stop patrolling drop boxes in Arizona. Tens of thousands of voter registrations are being challenged in Georgia. Voting rights groups have trained volunteers in de-escalation methods. Voters have been videotaped by groups hunting for fraud as they drop off their ballots. And Republican candidates across the country, from Arizona to Pennsylvania, continue to amplify Donald J. Trump’s false claims of corrupted elections. Two years after a presidential election warped by lies and disrupted by violence, suspicion and fear have become embedded in the mechanics of American democracy. As another Election Day nears, intimidation has crept up to levels not seen for decades, while self-appointed watchdogs search for fraud and monitor the vote. And election officials say they feel increasingly on edge, ready not just for the frenzy of Election Day but the chaos of misinformation and disputes that may follow. Even Republican election officials said they were braced for a renewed onslaught, one most likely to be fueled by their own party.

Full Article: Fears and Suspicion Hang Over Voting on Cusp of Election Day – The New York Times

National: ‘Rampant disinformation’ seen undermining safe voting technology | Gopal Ratnam/Roll Call

As Americans cast votes for congressional and gubernatorial candidates Tuesday, security experts are most concerned about the spread of misinformation and disinformation that threatens to undermine the integrity of the election process. The election technology itself has receded as a concern. State and local officials have addressed cybersecurity weaknesses and threats of hacking, the key threats seen in previous election cycles going back to 2016. Experts say Congress, federal agencies and private security firms aided those efforts. “I think the biggest new challenge we’re seeing is the disinformation challenge,” said Derek Tisler, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program. “While not actually threatening the security of elections, it is affecting how people view the security of elections, and many of the challenges can end up having the same effect.” Congress approved more than $1 billion in federal grants to be administered by the Election Assistance Commission since the 2016 elections to help states and local jurisdictions upgrade equipment and boost cybersecurity.

Full Article: ‘Rampant disinformation’ seen undermining safe voting technology

New Report: Coordinating Audits and Recounts to Strengthen Election Verification | Verified Voting and Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota

Download Report The 2020 presidential election was followed by an extensive period of scrutiny and challenge. Some of these activities were typical—automatic recounts, optional recounts, and routine tabulation audits—and some were highly irregular. Widespread misinformation sowed confusion and distrust. As election officials strive to promote public confidence in our elections, it is important to emphasize that recounts and tabulation audits are normal procedures, and they are vital to our elections. Recounts and audits, when properly designed and conducted, can help assure candidates and the public that there was a fair examination of the results and an accurate count of all legally cast votes. State requirements for tabulation audits have been expanding. Recounts are common and will continue to be part of the contentious post-election landscape. Elections need both audits and recounts, and they need audits and recounts to work well together. This paper describes how to dovetail audits and recounts to bolster public confidence in election results. Every state can do better, and this paper provides guidelines for how.

Source: Coordinating Audits and Recounts to Strengthen Election Verification – Verified Voting

National: Election officials fear counting delays will help fuel claims of fraud | om Hamburger , Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

Officials in a handful of closely contested states are warning that the winners of tight races may not be known on election night, raising the possibility of a delay that former president Donald Trump and his allies could exploit to cast doubt on the integrity of Tuesday’s midterm vote. In Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, officials have in recent days preemptively called for patience, acknowledging that some of the factors that bogged down the process in 2020 remain unresolved two years later. In some cases, partisan disagreements blocked fixes, and Trump’s own advice to voters on how to cast ballots may contribute to a longer wait. Although the reasons for the delays vary from state to state, officials have been united in urging the public not to draw conclusions just because the count appears to be proceeding slowly. “It’s going to take a few days,” acting Pennsylvania secretary of state Leigh M. Chapman said at a recent news conference. She added: “It doesn’t mean anything nefarious is happening.”

Full Article: Election officials fear counting delays will help fuel claims of fraud – The Washington Post

Special Report: Voting-system firms battle right-wing rage against the machines | elen Coster/Reuters

Donald Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods have thrust America’s voting machine suppliers into a national struggle to protect their businesses. Industry leaders Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software are waging a political and public relations ground war to beat back threats to their state and local government contracts, rooted in bogus conspiracy theories about vote manipulation. Dominion has also turned to the courts, filing eight defamation lawsuits against Trump allies and media outlets including Fox News. The efforts to fight misinformation have so far blocked any significant loss of business, in part because many counties and states are locked into long-term contracts for voting systems. But the companies are nonetheless taking the election-denial movement seriously as the belief in voter-fraud fictions continues to gain mainstream acceptance on the right. About two-thirds of U.S. Republicans say they believe the election was stolen from Trump, Reuters polls show. Whenever companies “face a tsunami of suspicion and distrust of their products, that poses an existential threat to their livelihood and survival,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a U.S. nonprofit that promotes the use of secure voting technology. … The systems are “far from perfect,” said Lindeman, of Verified Voting, but the torrent of pro-Trump vote-manipulation claims “make no sense whatsoever.”

Full Article: Special Report: Voting-system firms battle right-wing rage against the machines | Reuters

National: Will Election Deniers Again Try to Access Voting Systems? | Sue Halpern/The New Yorker

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