National

Millions in federal dollars could have gone to protect election workers and improve the physical security of their offices, but in a classic tale of bureaucratic red tape, most of it remains untapped less than two weeks before the midterm elections. The botched funding opportunity comes as election officials across the country have faced an unprecedented wave of violent threats stemming from conspiracy theories about the voting process. Now, things like additional lighting or security guards for some election offices may not be in place for Election Day on November 8. “Our security here is a joke,” said Scott McDonell, the Democratic clerk for Dane County, Wisconsin’s second largest. His office is a block from the state capitol building in Madison, where thousands of people have previously gathered to protest the 2020 election results. McDonell worries that people “could walk right in” to confront him. In April, the Department of Homeland Security reviewed the security of McDonell’s office and found glaring shortcomings, including doors within the facility that visitors could pass through unchecked, according to the DHS assessment obtained by CNN. Yet, until CNN told him about it, McDonell said he was unaware of a DHS grant program that has in recent years made millions of dollars available to state and local government offices for various security and counterterrorism projects to bolster their physical security. Instead, Dane County plans to spend $12 million in county money to move to a more secure facility next year. “Everyone agrees that something has to be done,” McDonell told CNN. “A lot of it is the employees. They have to feel safe on the job.”

Full Article: ‘Our security here is a joke’: Election workers lament lack of federal spending on security ahead of crucial midterms | CNN Politics

National: New Republican effort to feed “distrust of elections”: They want to hand-count all ballots | Areeba Shah/Salon

In what election experts call the latest effort to stoke widespread doubt about election security and the accuracy of vote-counting, Republicans in many rural counties are pushing to hand-count ballots in the upcoming midterms, despite no evidence of widespread fraud or voting machine irregularities. Hand-counting is far less accurate than machine counting, experts say, and is likely to create errors and delay results by hours, days or even weeks. In at least six states, Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation this year that would require hand-counting of all ballots instead of electronic tabulation. None of those bills have passed so far, but similar proposals have gained traction in some county and local governments. … Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for the responsible use of technology in elections, said that these efforts are part of a broader effort to discourage voters from trusting any part of the election process. American elections “objectively are more trustworthy now than they have been in decades, but the fear-mongers are broadcasting the exact opposite,” Lindeman said. Attacks on voting technology are “creating an environment in which some really dedicated public servants are leaving the profession because they’re demoralized and in many cases afraid. That is a tragedy that injures all of us.”

Full Article: New Republican effort to feed “distrust of elections”: They want to hand-count all ballots | Salon.com

National: How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable | Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel/The New York Times

On the morning of July 8, former President Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social, a social media platform he founded with people close to him, to claim that he had in fact won the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, despite all evidence to the contrary. Barely 8,000 people shared that missive on Truth Social, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of responses his posts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly generated before those services suspended his megaphones after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. And yet Mr. Trump’s baseless claim pulsed through the public consciousness anyway. It jumped from his app to other social media platforms — not to mention podcasts, talk radio or television. Within 48 hours of Mr. Trump’s post, more than one million people saw his claim on at least dozen other sites. It appeared on Facebook and Twitter, from which he has been banished, but also YouTube, Gab, Parler and Telegram, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Full Article: Ahead of Midterms, Disinformation Is Even More Intractable – The New York Times

National: A Scientist’s Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine | Spencer Mestel/Undark

In late 2020, a large box arrived at Juan Gilbert’s office at the University of Florida. The computer science professor had been looking for this kind of product for months. Previous orders had yielded poor results. This time, though, he was optimistic. Gilbert drove the package home. Inside was a transparent box, built by a French company and equipped with a 27-inch touchscreen. Almost immediately, Gilbert began modifying it. He put a printer inside and connected the device to Prime III, the voting system he has been building since the first term of the George W. Bush administration. After 19 years of building, tinkering, and testing, he told Undark this spring, he had finally invented “the most secure voting technology ever created.” Gilbert didn’t just want to publish a paper outlining his findings. He wanted the election security community to recognize what he’d accomplished — to acknowledge that this was, in fact, a breakthrough. In the spring of 2022, he emailed several of the most respected and vocal critics of voting technology, including Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University. He issued a simple challenge: Hack my machine. Their access would be unfettered — no tamper-evident seals to avoid, chain of custody procedures to subvert, or mock poll workers to dupe — and they’d have to agree to only one condition: Flip every vote to the same candidate. By this point, Gilbert had published a video of his ballot-marking device, or BMD, in action, but he was unsure how the hacking community would respond. “There’s a part of that community that’s very confident in what they do,” he said. “And if they hear how it works, they may run away from it.”

Full Article: A Scientist’s Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine

National: Pro-Trump Republicans court election volunteers to ‘challenge any vote’ | Patrick Marley, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

The Republican National Committee and its allies say they have staged thousands of training sessions around the country on how to monitor voting and lodge complaints about next month’s midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, party officials have boasted about swelling the ranks of poll watchers to six times the total from 2020. In Michigan, a right-wing group announced it had launched “Operation Overwatch” to hunt down election-related malfeasance, issuing a press release that repeated the warning “We are watching” 10 times. Supporters of former president Donald Trump who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen have summoned a swarm of poll watchers and workers in battleground states to spot potential fraud this year. It is a call to action that could subject voting results around the country to an unprecedented level of suspicion and unfounded doubt. “We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, OK?” one-time Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said on a recent episode of his podcast. “We don’t care if you don’t like it. We don’t care if you’re going to run around and light your hair on fire. That’s the way this is going to roll.”

Full Article: Trump supporters say they’re training poll watchers to spot fraud – The Washington Post

National: In a Climate of Threats, Election Offices Focus on Security | Carl Smith/Governing

Early voting for midterm elections is well underway in many states, and so far has proceeded without major incident. But a new Reuters/Ipos poll finds that four in 10 of American voters are worried they will encounter intimidation or threats of violence at polling places. (Two out of three fear actual violence from extremists if they are displeased with election outcomes.) In a paradoxical crusade for transparency, armed “observers” stationed themselves near Arizona ballot boxes with their faces and license plates masked, taking photos of voters and their vehicle tags. A group of retired and Latino voters filed a lawsuit against the organization the watchers claim to represent. Responding to news of such activity, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the Justice Department “will not permit voters to be intimidated” during midterms. Last year, the DOJ established a task force to address threats against those involved in administering elections and an 800 number and online complaint form for reporting threats to the FBI. The prospects for disruption vary within the more than 170,000 electoral precincts in the country, but physical and cybersecurity are priorities for all. Moreover, vigilantes can create uncertainty by menacing officials across state and local borders.

Full Article: In a Climate of Threats, Election Offices Focus on Security

National: Election Day is Nov. 8, but legal challenges already begin | Colleen Long/Associated Press

Election Day is 12 days away. But in courtrooms across the country, efforts to sow doubt over the outcome have already begun. More than 100 lawsuits have been filed this year around the Nov. 8 elections. The legal challenges, largely by Republicans, target rules for mail-in voting, early voting, voter access, voting machines, voting registration, the counting of mismarked absentee ballots and access for partisan poll watchers. The cases likely preview a potentially contentious post-election period and the strategy stems partly from the failure of Donald Trump and his allies to prevail in overturning the free and fair results of the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden. That was an ad hoc response fronted by a collection of increasingly ill-prepared lawyers that included Rudy Giuliani. The current effort, however, is more formalized, well-funded and well-organized and is run by the Republican National Committee and other legal allies with strong credentials. Party officials say they are preparing for recounts, contested elections and more litigation. Thousands of volunteers are ready to challenge ballots and search for evidence of malfeasance. “We’re now at the point where charges of fraud and suppression are baked into the turnout models for each party,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, co-chair of the Election Official Legal Defense Network and former counsel to the George W. Bush campaign and other Republican candidates. “Republicans charge fraud. Democrats charge suppression. Each side amplifies its position with massive and costly amounts of litigation and messaging.”

Full Article: Election Day is Nov. 8, but legal challenges already begin | AP News

National: Security officials worry about homegrown election threats | Zeba Siddiqui and Christopher Bing/Reuters

Domestic disinformation campaigns and homegrown threats to poll workers are emerging as bigger concerns ahead of the Nov. 8 U.S. congressional elections than foreign interference, according to U.S. cybersecurity and law enforcement officials. Russia and Iran, accused of meddling in past U.S. elections using disinformation campaigns, are enmeshed in their own crises – the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Iranian mass protests – and have not yet been found to have targeted this election, said two senior U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. According to information disclosed as part of criminal cases, Russian and Iranian intelligence units deployed hackers and fake social media accounts in recent U.S. elections to try to influence the vote and sow discord. Election integrity has been a contentious issue in the United States, particularly in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Republican former President Donald Trump continues to make false claims that the election was stolen from him by Democrat Joe Biden through widespread voting fraud.

Full Article: U.S. security officials worry about homegrown election threats | Reuters

National: Some Republicans Want to Count Votes by Hand. Bad Idea, Experts Say. | Maggie Astor/The New York Times

Over the past two years, Republicans have pursued an array of changes to how Americans vote. The past few weeks have drawn attention to a particularly drastic idea: counting all ballots by hand. Officials in Cochise County, Ariz., recently pushed to do that in next month’s election, and whether or not they go through with it, the efforts may spread. Republicans in at least six states introduced bills this year that would have banned machine tabulation, and several candidates for statewide offices have expressed support, including Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, the party’s nominees for Arizona’s governor and secretary of state, and Jim Marchant, its nominee for Nevada’s secretary of state. The New York Times spoke with six experts in election administration, and all said the same thing: While hand counting is an important tool for recounts and audits, tallying entire elections by hand in any but the smallest jurisdictions would cause chaos and make results less accurate, not more. “People who think they would have greater confidence in this process think so because they haven’t seen it,” said Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization focused on election technology. “The process in real life would not inspire confidence at all on this scale.”

Full Article: Some Republicans Want to Count Votes by Hand. Bad Idea, Experts Say. – The New York Times

National: How America casts and counts its votes | Reuters

Misinformation online and false claims of election fraud by former President Donald Trump and his allies have sharply eroded public trust in the integrity of U.S. elections. How Americans vote — and the equipment they use — varies widely, and some methods are more vulnerable to efforts to shake that trust. Heading into the 2022 midterms, election experts say the move in most states to hybrid voting systems – paper ballots tallied by electronic machines – could give voters greater confidence. The United States invested hugely in paperless electronic voting machines after the contested presidential election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush in 2000 shook election officials’ confidence in paper ballots. By 2006, the share of registered voters using paperless machines had surged, though hand-marked paper ballots that are later scanned by electronic tabulators remained the most popular. For the next decade, about a third of all votes were cast on direct recording electronic machines.

Full Article: Explainer: U.S. midterm elections: How America casts and counts its votes | Reuters

National: Election deniers in charge of some county election offices are continuing to sow mistrust in the electoral system | Bob Ortega, Audrey Ash, Curt Devine and Scott Bronstein/CNN

Pop into a meeting of the Board of Elections in Spalding County, Georgia, and it may appear like any other eye-glazing gathering of bureaucrats being led by a no-nonsense chair. “We hang our political hats at the door when we come in and do the people’s work,” Board Chairman Ben Johnson said at one meeting earlier this year. “There ain’t no room for politics in elections.” But Johnson’s stated beliefs don’t appear to be so easily left at the door. An election-conspiracy believer, Johnson has authored a social media post to “fellow insurrectionists” and proclaimed that Joe Biden “is an illegitimate president.” On social media, he has called for banning electronic voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting; echoed debunked claims about “ballot trafficking;” and proudly posted a photo with MyPillow founder and election conspiracist Mike Lindell. Among other actions since taking office, Johnson has voted not to renew the county’s maintenance contract with Dominion Voting Systems – a frequent target of election conspiracy theories. As chairman, Johnson will have charge of the county board’s certification of the November midterm results – and his actions and continuing claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent have raised concerns over how he and the Republican-controlled board will handle the upcoming election.

Full Article: Election deniers in charge of some county election offices are continuing to sow mistrust in the electoral system | CNN Politics

National: Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists hound election officials out of office | Linda So, Joseph Tanfani and Jason Szep/Reuters

Businessman Robert Beadles claimed he had found evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Then he went on the attack, targeting a 48-year-old woman who runs elections in Nevada’s Washoe County. “Now, let’s talk about treason. That’s right, treason,” Beadles told a Feb. 22 county commissioners’ meeting in Washoe, the second-largest county in this election battleground state. The Republican activist falsely accused the registrar of voters, Deanna Spikula, of counting fraudulent votes and told commissioners to “either fire her or lock her up.” After the meeting, Spikula’s office was flooded with hostile and harassing calls from people convinced she was part of a conspiracy to rig the election against former U.S. President Donald Trump. On March 2, a caller threatened to bring 100 people to the county building to “put this to bed today.” Spikula, under severe stress, stopped coming into the office. A post on Beadles’ website said she was “rumored to be in rehab.” That was false, she said; she was at home, working on a state elections manual. By late June, fearing for her family’s safety, she’d had enough and submitted her resignation. Beadles’ campaign in Washoe is part of a wave of efforts by pro-Trump activists to gain control of voting administration by replacing county government leaders with election conspiracy theorists. Some are spending big money. In Nevada, Beadles has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns targeting opponents of Trump’s false rigged-election claims and backing Republicans who believe them.

Full Article: Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists hound election officials out of office

National: Right-Wing Leaders Mobilize Corps of Election Activists | Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

On the eve of a primary runoff election in June, a Republican candidate for secretary of state of South Carolina sent out a message to his supporters. “For all of you on the team tomorrow observing the polls, Good Hunting,” Keith Blandford, a candidate who promoted the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump, wrote on the social media app Telegram. “You know what you are looking for. We have the enemy on their back foot, press the attack.” The next day, activists fanned out to polling places in Charleston, S.C., demanding to inspect election equipment and to take photographs and video. When election workers denied their requests, some returned with police officers to file reports about broken or missing seals on the machines, according to emails from local officials to the state election commission. There were no broken or missing seals. After Mr. Blandford lost, the activists posted online a list of more than 60 “anomalies” they observed, enough to have changed the outcome of races, they said. They called the operation a “pilot program.” The episode is one of many that have election officials on alert as voting begins for midterm elections, the biggest test of the American election system since Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 results launched an assault on the democratic process.

Full Article: Right-Wing Leaders Mobilize Corps of Election Activists – The New York Times

National: Voting and vote-counting concerns grow ahead of midterms | Rick Klein, Averi Harper, and Alisa Wiersema/ABC

Almost 2 million people have already voted in this year’s general election — a level of participation reached earlier than ever in a midterm cycle, according to the University of Florida’s U.S. Elections Project. With 22 days — and what may be more than 100 million more ballots — to go before Nov. 8, the pace of voting is set to pick up even as questions grow around almost every aspect of voting: access to ballots, manpower running elections, the pace and integrity of vote counting and, of course, whether results will be accepted by losing Republicans up and down the ballot. Early voting starts Monday in Georgia, a state at the center of so many of 2020’s political storms and where additional voting restrictions have been imposed since then. Monday night’s debate between Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams is likely to surface questions about 2022 in a high-profile way. Other key states, meanwhile, are already warning that vote counting could take days after Election Day to complete — and that if that happens, it doesn’t indicate there’s automatically something to mistrust about the results.

Full Article: Voting and vote-counting concerns grow ahead of midterms: The Note – ABC News

National: Poll Shows Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority | Nick Corasaniti, Michael C. Bender, Ruth Igielnik and Kristen Bayrakdarian/The New York Times

Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system. The doubts about elections that have infected American politics since the 2020 contest show every sign of persisting well into the future, the poll suggested: Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections. Political disagreements appear to be seeping into the fabric of everyday life. Fourteen percent of voters said political views revealed a lot about whether someone is a good person, while 34 percent said it revealed a little. Nearly one in five said political disagreements had hurt relationships with friends or family. “I do agree that the biggest threat is survival of our democracy, but it’s the divisiveness that is creating this threat,” said Ben Johnson, 33, a filmmaker from New Orleans and a Democrat. “It feels like on both sides, people aren’t agreeing on facts anymore. We can’t meet in the middle if we can’t agree on simple facts. You’re not going to be able to move forward and continue as a country if you can’t agree on facts.”

Full Article: Poll Shows Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority – The New York Times

How wireless modems in voting machines could endanger the midterms | Eric Geller/Politico

There’s a largely overlooked hacking target that could help those who want to sow doubt about vote tallies in the November midterms: cellular modems that transmit unofficial election-night results. The modems, which send vote data from precincts to central offices using cellphone networks, help election officials satisfy the public’s demand for rapid results. But putting any networking connection on an election system opens up new ways to attack it that don’t require physical access to machines, and security experts say the risks aren’t worth the rewards. “You’re counting on a bunch of infrastructure to deliver data back and forth, and it’s well within the capabilities of nation-state hackers to break into that infrastructure,” said Dan Wallach, a Rice University computer science professor who has repeatedly exposed flaws in election equipment. While tampering with unofficial results wouldn’t actually corrupt an election’s outcome, it could fuel misinformation about both the accuracy of the vote tally and the integrity of the process. That’s a particular concern since the 2020 election, in which then-President Donald Trump seized on large discrepancies between early returns and final vote counts to falsely allege widespread fraud.

Full Article: How wireless modems in voting machines could endanger the midterms – POLITICO

Hand-counting ballots would cause ‘downright chaos,’ experts say | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Cochise County officials are considering hand-counting all ballots cast by the county’s 87,000 voters this election, a radical measure for a county of its size that election experts say is also problematic and unnecessary. A hand count would produce inaccurate results, confuse voters, and consume extensive time, money, and labor, said C.Jay Coles, senior policy and advocacy associate at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for the responsible use of technology in elections. The county elections office estimated a hand count in Cochise would take 2,500 total hours of work. Election researchers and consultants generally advise against hand-counting ballots, because machine counts are proven to be more accurate and efficient. “It’s such an opportunity for confusion, and, really, downright chaos,” Coles said. The Republican-leaning county on the southern Arizona border is the latest to propose such an idea, part of a larger trend fueled by distrust of vote-counting machines that emerged after the 2020 election, when conspiracy theorists spread unfounded claims that the machines had been programmed to switch votes in favor of Joe Biden. In neighboring Nevada, a state judge recently ruled that Nye County could move forward with a similar plan that had been challenged by a progressive advocacy group, ruling that the state law doesn’t prohibit hand-counting ballots. Efforts to force hand counts in New Hampshire slowed down election results last month for the primary. And after the election, in El Paso County, Colorado, losing candidates called for their races to be recounted by hand, which is not allowed under state law. Less than one percent of registered voters in America live in jurisdictions where ballots are hand-counted, and many of them are small towns or precincts, according to research conducted by Verified Voting.

Full Article: Hand-counting ballots would cause ‘downright chaos,’ experts say

National: America First Secretary of State Coalition boosts Trump-aligned election deniers vying to oversee elections | Keith Newell/OpenSecrets

The America First Secretary of State Coalition, a coalition of Republican candidates touting disproven claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, raised more than $300,000 through a Nevada-based PAC called Conservatives for Election Integrity in an effort to exert control over election administration in battleground states, an OpenSecrets analysis of Nevada campaign finance records found. The coalition aims to elect candidates who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and will be positioned to influence the outcome of future elections, including the 2024 presidential race, according to the group’s founder, Jim Marchant, the GOP nominee in Nevada’s secretary of state race. The proliferation of misinformation about voting fraud and conspiracy theories have thrust secretary of state races into the forefront of American politics this year. Candidates for secretary of state have reported raising over $51.8 million in the 2022 election cycle as of Oct. 13. The 12 election-denying candidates who received the GOP nomination for secretary of state have raised $6.2 million, an OpenSecrets analysis of campaign finance data shows. Marchant touted the coalition at a Trump rally in Minden, Nev., on Saturday, telling the crowd, “When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re gonna fix the whole country, and President Trump is gonna be president again in 2024.” “All we have to do is influence it a little bit, and we win,” Marchant said in a September interview with Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump. “And we negate whatever ability they have to manipulate the system.”

Full Article: America First Secretary of State Coalition boosts Trump-aligned election deniers vying to oversee elections • OpenSecrets

National: Election workers in battleground states faced onslaught of malicious emails, researchers say | AJ Vicens/Cyberscoop

County election workers in Arizona and Pennsylvania were inundated with a “surge” in malicious emails ahead of those states’ August primaries, security researchers said Wednesday, highlighting the ongoing threat facing election officials weeks before contentious midterms. The malicious activity, which included password theft attempts and efforts to deliver malware via poisoned links, is particularly concerning considering that county election workers are often “the least sophisticated actors in terms of cybersecurity postures, but the most critical in actual electoral engagement with voters,” researchers with cybersecurity firm Trellix’s Advanced Research Center said Wednesday. Voting officials and poll workers nationwide have become much more security aware since the 2016 Russian election interference operations, but malicious activities remain a concern for all election workers who “have become targets of threats and intimidation in the physical realm,” the researchers said. Poll workers around the country have faced a growing number of threats ahead of the 2020 election and in the months after. Now, officials in multiple states are reporting new pressures ahead of the midterms. Some state officials have reported a deluge of records requests from “self-styled fraud investigators,” The New York Times reported recently, while others have been offered training designed to prevent violence through de-escalation, CNN reported Sept. 30.

Full Article: Election workers in battleground states faced onslaught of malicious emails, researchers say

National: Election offices tighten security for Nov. 8 midterms | Andy Sullivan and Julia Harte/Reuters

When voters in Jefferson County, Colorado, cast their ballots in the Nov. 8 midterm election, they will see security guards stationed outside the busiest polling centers. At an election office in Flagstaff, Arizona, voters will encounter bulletproof glass and need to press a buzzer to enter. In Tallahassee, Florida, election workers will count ballots in a building that has been newly toughened with walls made of the super-strong fiber Kevlar. Spurred by a deluge of threats and intimidating behavior by conspiracy theorists and others upset over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, some election officials across the United States are fortifying their operations as they ramp up for another divisive election. A Reuters survey of 30 election offices found that 15 have enhanced security in various ways, from installing panic buttons to hiring extra security guards to holding active-shooter and de-escalation training. Reuters focused on offices in battleground states and offices that had openly expressed a need for security improvements, for example in congressional testimony. While the survey does not speak to how widespread such moves are, it does show how election officials are responding to threats in parts of the country where the election will likely be decided.

Full Article: U.S. election offices tighten security for Nov. 8 midterms | Reuters

National: ‘Stop the steal’ supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers | Ned Parker, Linda So and Moira Warburton/Reuters

Inside the El Paso County clerk’s office in Colorado, where officials had gathered in July to recount votes in a Republican nominating contest for this year’s midterms, dozens of angry election watchers pounded on the windows, at times yelling at workers and recording them with cell phones. In the hallway a group prayed for “evil to descend” on the “election team,” said the county’s Republican clerk Chuck Broerman. “It’s astonishing to me to hear something like that.” The election watchers had showed up to observe a five-day recount of votes for four Republican candidates who claimed the primary was fraudulent in a contest where they faced other Republicans. Protesters had mobilized outside the clerk’s office, holding signs with the signature “Stop the Steal” slogan of former President Donald Trump and demanding the county get rid of its voting machines. As the United States enters the final stretch to November’s midterm elections, Reuters documented multiple incidents of intimidation involving an expanding army of election observers, many of them recruited by prominent Republican Party figures and activists echoing Trump’s false theories about election fraud. The widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election as alleged by Trump and his supporters was never proven.

Full Article: ‘Stop the steal’ supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers | Reuters

National: Republican National Committee seizes on political affiliations of poll workers in swing states | atrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

For months, conservative activists who tried to overturn the 2020 election results have urged Republicans to become poll workers so they can be on the front lines of watching for fraud. Yet for the August primary in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the number of Democrats working at the polls was 18 percent higher than the number of Republicans. Such a gap is typical and legal, county leaders say, but Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has seized on it in an effort to cast doubt on the way elections are run in the swing state’s most populous county, which encompasses Phoenix. That has angered county officials, many of them fellow Republicans, who see this as a new attempt to spread misinformation, erode faith in the voting process, lay the foundation to contest results should GOP candidates lose and unfairly focus attention on election workers, some of whom have endured threats and harassment after Joe Biden narrowly won the state in 2020. The RNC and the Arizona GOP filed two lawsuits this week that seek to make the county shorten shifts for poll workers to make the jobs more accessible and force the release of records about who worked the polls in the primary. McDaniel mischaracterized the scope of the lawsuits in a tweet Wednesday, falsely claiming that Arizona Republicans have been “shut out of the process.” The RNC did not respond to a request to explain how Republicans have been excluded.

Full Article: RNC seizes on political affiliations of poll workers in swing states – The Washington Post

National: Election Firm Konnech Knew Data Had Been Sent to China, Prosecutors Say | Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

When Eugene Yu’s small election software company signed a contract to help Los Angeles County organize poll workers for the 2020 election, he agreed to keep the workers’ personal data in the United States. But the company, Konnech, transferred personal data on thousands of the election workers to developers in China who were writing and troubleshooting software, according to a court filing that Los Angeles County prosecutors made on Thursday. The filing adds new details about the arrest last week of Mr. Yu, whose company has been the focus of groups challenging the validity of the 2020 presidential election. Some of those groups have accused the company of storing information about poll workers on servers in China. Before the arrest, the company repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States, including in statements to The New York Times. Los Angeles prosecutors initially accused Mr. Yu of embezzling public money by knowingly violating the terms of the company’s contract. Since searching Konnech’s offices and Mr. Yu’s home, the prosecutors have also accused him of conspiring with others to commit a crime, according to the new legal filing. It is rare for an executive to face criminal charges for potentially mishandling data. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday. In the filing, prosecutors said a project manager at Konnech had sent an internal email early this month saying the company would no longer send personal data to Chinese contractors. “We need to ensure the security privacy and confidentially,” the email said.

Full Article: Election Firm Knew Data Had Been Sent to China, Prosecutors Say – The New York Times

National: Election Officials Are on Alert for Cyber, Physical Attacks | David Uberti/Wall Street Journal

The array of potential threats to the 2022 midterms is “more complex than it has ever been,” a top U.S. official said Thursday, but Washington has yet to see specific or credible attempts by foreign governments to disrupt the Nov. 8 vote. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, warned of multipronged threats that could include hacking of computer networks, disinformation on social media and harassment campaigns that affect poll workers in the physical world. “The security challenges are intertwined,” Ms. Easterly said. “They can’t be viewed in isolation when you think about foreign interference.” CISA has taken an increasingly prominent role in recent years to coordinate security among the network of state and local agencies that hold elections across the U.S. While those efforts previously focused on countering digital interference by countries such as Russia, some cybersecurity experts say the Kremlin’s capacity for election meddling has shrunk. “Russian influence capabilities have very likely deteriorated as a result of the nation’s war against Ukraine,” cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said in a 2022 election report released Thursday. Instead, election officials this year have reported a surge in physical threats, largely from people angry about President Biden’s defeat of former President Donald Trump in 2020.

Full Article: U.S. Election Officials Are on Alert for Cyber, Physical Attacks – WSJ

Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every level | Sam Levine and Ed Pilkington/The Guardian

Item number 28 on the agenda for the March meeting of the county commission in rural southern Nevada seemed benign enough. But by the end of the hour-and-45-minute presentation Sandra Merlino, the longtime local clerk, felt sickened. One by one, a band of activists took to the podium to argue that Nye county should switch from electronic ballots to paper ones in forthcoming elections. They were led by Jim Marchant, a Las Vegas businessman who lost a 2020 House race but refused to concede, alleging fraud. He argued that the county couldn’t trust its electronic election equipment and that it should switch to a system in which it only used paper ballots and counted those ballots by hand. Three other speakers offered a flurry of complex-sounding analyses purporting to prove that the county’s voting equipment was vulnerable to hacking. They included Russell Ramsland, a Texas man who helped Donald Trump and allies push outlandish theories about fraud after the 2020 race, and Phil Waldron, a former army colonel who produced a 38-slide PowerPoint presentation after the 2020 race, urging Trump to seize control of voting equipment. Merlino was alarmed. She knew that what they were saying was bogus – the county’s election systems aren’t connected to the internet and there’s no evidence they were not secure. Counting ballots by hand was costly, not reliable, and would take a long time after the election to complete. “It’s so prone to error,” she said. “It just is a nightmare as far as I’m concerned.”

Full Article: Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every level | US news | The Guardian

National: Election Software Executive Arrested on Suspicion of Theft | Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

The top executive of an elections technology company that has been the focus of attention among election deniers was arrested by Los Angeles County officials in connection with an investigation into the possible theft of personal information about poll workers, the county said on Tuesday. Eugene Yu, the founder and chief executive of Konnech, the technology company, was taken into custody on suspicion of theft, the Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascón, said in a statement. Konnech, which is based in Michigan, develops software to manage election logistics, like scheduling poll workers. Los Angeles County is among its customers. The company has been accused by groups challenging the validity of the 2020 presidential election with storing information about poll workers on servers in China. The company has repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States, including in recent statements to The New York Times. Mr. Gascón’s office said its investigators had found data stored in China. Holding the data there would violate Konnech’s contract with the county.

Full Article: Election Software Executive Arrested on Suspicion of Theft – The New York Times

National: Hand-counting ballots may sound nice. It’s actually less accurate and more expensive | Miles Parks/NPR

It’s a common refrain from election deniers and the Republicans who support them this election cycle: Get rid of the machines. According to many conspiracy theorists, the 2020 election was stolen by an algorithm, therefore if you take computers out of the voting process you can further secure your election. At a county commission meeting in Nevada’s Nye County this past March, for instance, Jim Marchant, an election denier who is the GOP nominee to be that state’s secretary of state, implored local officials to ditch their vote-counting equipment. “It is imperative that you secure the trust of your constituents in Nye County by ensuring that you have a fair and transparent election and the only way to do that is to not use electronic voting or tabulation machines,” he said. It’s a false sentiment that has festered in far-right corners across the country, shepherded by election denial influencers like MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and his acolytes. In some cases, officials are listening. Nye County is planning to hand-count ballots, alongside machine tabulation, in this November’s midterm elections, and another county in Nevada, Esmeralda, spent more than seven hours hand-counting just 317 ballots as part of its certification of this summer’s primary election.

Full Article: Voting explainer: Why experts oppose hand-counting ballots : NPR

National: Hundreds of elections deniers running for office nationwide in 2022 pose ‘major threat’ to U.S. democracy | Phillip M. Bailey/USA Today

Republican Mark Finchem maintains that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t on the up-and-up in Arizona. During the 30-minute secretary of state debate against Democratic rival Adrian Fontes on Sept. 22, he continued to argue – without providing evidence – that some votes were “outside of the law.” But when asked by moderators if the state’s 2022 midterm primaries in August were also fair, the GOP nominee to be Arizona’s chief election officer was caught flat footed. “What changed? The candidates,” Finchem said. “I have no idea. We’ve not really dug into what happened with our processing of ballots. The machines were the same.” Yet Finchem isn’t the only candidate on the ballot this November who has peddled false claims about 2020 that election experts and pro-democracy groups warn could undermine the next presidential contest – and subvert American democracy.

Full Article: Hundreds of candidates who denied 2020 results running for office

National: Election officials brace for confrontational poll watchers | Hannah Schoenbaum and Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

The situation with the poll watcher had gotten so bad that Anne Risku, the election director in North Carolina’s Wayne County, had to intervene via speakerphone. “You need to back off!” Risku recalled hollering after the woman wedged herself between a voter and the machine where the voter was trying to cast his ballot at a precinct about 60 miles southeast of Raleigh. The man eventually was able to vote, but the incident was one of several Risku cited from the May primary that made her worry about a wave of newly aggressive poll watchers. Many have spent the past two years steeped in lies about the accuracy of the 2020 election. Those fears led the North Carolina State Board of Elections in August to tighten rules governing poll watchers. But the state’s rules review board, appointed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, blocked the new poll watcher regulations in late September, leaving election officials such as Risku without additional tools to control behavior on Election Day, Nov. 8. “It becomes complete babysitting,” Risku said in an interview. “The back and forth for the precinct officials, having somebody constantly on you for every little thing that you do — not because you’re doing it wrong, but because they don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

Full Article: Election officials brace for confrontational poll watchers | AP News

National: Election officials confront a new problem: Whether they can trust their own poll workers | Zach Montellaro/Politico