National

National: States pass new laws to protect election workers amid ongoing threats | Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Lawmakers in California recently approved legislation that aims to shield election officials from threats and harassment – becoming the latest state to attempt to confront the wave of abuse against election workers that began in the aftermath of the 2020 election and continues today. The new legislation would give election workers the option to have their addresses and other personal information redacted from government records. In addition, it amends a longstanding provision of California law that required the public posting of full names of precinct board members. Under the measure, only the party affiliations of those precinct officials must be publicly available. It awaits the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. “It will make someone feel safer if they know, that ‘Ok, it won’t be as easy to figure out where I live,’ ” said Gowri Ramachandran, a senior counsel at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, which advocated for the legislation. Election officials from around the country – ranging from secretaries of state to temporary poll workers – have testified publicly about how scary life has become for them. In one of the most heart-rending examples this year, former Georgia election worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss tearfully described to the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection how her life was turned “upside down” by the lie that she had committed voter fraud. And during a roundtable last month sponsored by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos said one staffer in his office suffered symptoms of PTSD and took a leave of absence to receive counseling after the office was targeted with repeated death threats.

Full Article: States pass new laws to protect election workers amid ongoing threats | CNN Politics

National: Campaign cybersecurity might be the weakest link in the midterms | Tim Starks/The Washington Post

An official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said last week that election security is “light-years ahead” of where it was in 2016. But there’s one area lagging behind as the 2022 midterm vote looms: the cybersecurity of political candidates’ campaigns. In the aftermath of Russia’s election interference in the 2016 cycle, Congress delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local governments to spend on things like replacing less secure voting machines and giving cybersecurity training to election officials. There’s been no comparable mobilization for campaign security. That’s noteworthy because Russian hackers breaking into the systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign kicked off the big election security push in the first place. And political campaigns — almost none of which have dedicated cybersecurity staffers, and are near-totally focused on dedicating every available dollar to victory — are highly vulnerable.

Full Article: Campaign cybersecurity might be the weakest link in the midterms – The Washington Post

Georgia voting breach reminds us how dangerous Trump’s ‘big lie’ is | The Washington Post

The tale of how rogue actors sought to access voting systems after the 2020 election becomes more convoluted with every new piece of information. Yet the bottom line remains simple: Former president Donald Trump’s allies went to swing states around the country breaching critical infrastructure and damaging democracy even as they claimed to protect it. The “big lie” motivating their efforts is as potent a threat today.
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New surveillance video from rural Coffee County, Ga., as reported by The Post’s Emma Brown and Jon Swaine, reveals a hodgepodge of election deniers visited a local elections office in early 2021 as they hunted for nonexistent proof of voter fraud. Most interesting are the activists’ links to each other and similar gambits elsewhere: Some were forensic specialists hired by lawyer Sidney Powell to copy sensitive software — an incident already the subject of a federal lawsuit against Georgia authorities. Others, it now appears, were consultants connected to interference in multiple other states including Michigan, where the same forensic firm also traveled for the same purpose, according to records.

The precise connections between attempts to probe voting systems not only in Georgia and Michigan but also in New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona remain unclear. What’s obvious, however, is the devastating impact of the tampering. Of course, when a password to a machine appears on YouTube, there’s a security risk. Punching a hole in a system also renders it more vulnerable to future hacking, which puts a heavy burden on cash-strapped jurisdictions forced to replace their equipment. Technical safeguards can mitigate some of this danger. But no piece of computer code can restore the public’s trust in the integrity of the country’s elections. That’s true for those who believe President Biden won in 2020 but now worry that hackers can fiddle with results, as well as those who still think, contrary to all available evidence, that Trump was the real victor — whose suspicions the meddlers sought to stoke.

‘Absolutely terrifying prospect’: How the midterms could weaken U.S. election security | Eric Geller/Politico

Republicans who support former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election would gain the power to open up access to their states’ voting machines if they win in November — a prospect that security experts call potentially catastrophic for American democracy. Already, unvetted outsiders have examined voting equipment or inspected the devices’ sensitive computer code in counties in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, bypassing longstanding security protections — in many cases with the support of Trump allies overseeing local elections. Now Republicans who embrace the former president’s conspiracy theories are running for governor or secretary of state, offices that would give them even broader authority to allow like-minded activists and consulting firms to conduct so-called “audits” of the entire voting systems in key states. These kinds of examinations would make it easier for hackers intent on sowing chaos or changing the outcomes of future elections to learn how to conduct their attacks, according to voting security professionals, who note that some sensitive information about voting machines has already been leaked since Trump supporters began their push for audits. It’s “an absolutely terrifying prospect,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer security expert and professor at the University of Michigan who has repeatedly exposed flaws in voting systems but has also debunked Trump’s claims about 2020 fraud.

Full Article: ‘Absolutely terrifying prospect’: How the midterms could weaken U.S. election security – POLITICO

Election deniers on ballot: What does this mean for democracy? | Peter Grier and Noah Robertson/CSMonitor

Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate to become Arizona’s top election official, secretary of state, has said he would not have certified President Joe Biden’s victory there in 2020. Kristina Karamo, the GOP nominee for Michigan secretary of state, claims that the 2020 vote there was rife with fraud and that former President Donald Trump – not President Biden, who won the state by 154,000 votes – was the true victor of the state’s Electoral College votes. Doug Mastriano, Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, is a state lawmaker who introduced a resolution following the 2020 vote claiming that the election was “irredeemably corrupted” and the state legislature should appoint new delegates to the Electoral College. If he wins the governorship this November, Mr. Mastriano would have the power to appoint Pennsylvania’s next secretary of state. Across America, Republicans who question the legitimacy of the last presidential election are on the ballot for the 2022 midterms. At least 195 GOP Senate, House, governor, attorney general, or secretary of state nominees have echoed Mr. Trump’s false charge that the presidential election was stolen, data media site FiveThirtyEight estimated this week. Yet multiple reviews in state after state have shown the election to be fair and the results accurate. Multiple officials of both parties, including Mr. Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr, have said they saw no evidence of widespread fraud.

Full Article: Election deniers on ballot: What does this mean for democracy? – CSMonitor.com

National: Cameras, Plexiglass, Fireproofing: Election Officials Beef Up Security | Neil Vigdor/The New York Times

In Wisconsin, one of the nation’s key swing states, cameras and plexiglass now fortify the reception area of a county election office in Madison, the capital, after a man wearing camouflage and a mask tried to open locked doors during an election in April.In another bellwether area, Maricopa County, Ariz., where beleaguered election workers had to be escorted through a scrum of election deniers to reach their cars in 2020, a security fence was added to protect the perimeter of a vote tabulation center.And in Colorado, the state’s top election official, Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and a Democrat, resorted to paying for private security out of her budget after a stream of threats.As the nation hurtles closer to the midterm elections, those who will oversee them are taking a range of steps to beef up security for themselves, their employees, polling places and even drop boxes, tapping state and federal funding for a new set of defenses. The heightened vigilance comes as violent rhetoric from the right intensifies and as efforts to intimidate election officials by those who refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election become commonplace.Discussing security in a recent interview with The Times, Ms. Griswold, 37, said that threats of violence had kept her and her aides up late at night as they combed through comments on social media.

Full Article: Before Midterms, Election Officials Increase Security Over Threats – The New York Times

National: Election activists are seeking the “cast vote record” from 2020. Here’s what it is and why they want it. | Rachel Leingang/Votebeat

Elections departments across the country are getting tons of near-identical requests for an obscure document generated by ballot-counting machines, spurred by people who insist this record could help detect fraudulent voting patterns that show former President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election. It is the latest example of the endless, fruitless quest for a smoking gun that has so far yielded no proof of wrongdoing affecting the election results. But the document, called a “cast vote record,” can’t be used to detect these kinds of patterns, nor is it particularly useful to people who aren’t researchers or auditors, experts say. And the sheer number of requests is overwhelming elections offices as they prepare for this year’s general election. “The remarkable thing is that there’s really a lot less here than it might seem in both directions. It’s way less ominous than it could be, but it’s also way less useful,” said Max Hailperin, a retired computer science professor who has researched election technology. Put simply, a cast vote record is the electronic representation of how voters voted. These lines of data appear in a spreadsheet full of zeros and ones to indicate the votes an anonymous ballot contained. Whether the resulting records can be made public varies around the country, and the exact definition and appearance of what’s included in a cast vote record also varies, depending on the jurisdiction and the voting technology it uses.

Full Article: What is a cast vote record? Election activists seek obscure document from ballot tabulators. – Votebeat Arizona – Nonpartisan local reporting on elections and voting

National: Election conspiracies find fertile ground in conferences | Margery A. Beck and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

On a quiet Saturday in an Omaha hotel, about 50 people gathered in a ballroom to learn about elections. The subject wasn’t voter registration drives or poll worker volunteer training. Instead, they paid $25 each to listen to panelists lay out conspiracy theories about voting machines and rigged election results. In language that sometimes leaned into violent imagery, some panelists called on those attending to join what they framed as a battle between good and evil. Among those in the audience was Melissa Sauder, who drove nearly 350 miles from the small western Nebraska town of Grant with her 13-year-old daughter. After years of combing internet sites, listening to podcasts and reading conservative media reports, Sauder wanted to learn more about what she believes are serious problems with the integrity of U.S. elections. She can’t shake the belief that voting machines are being manipulated even in her home county, where then-President Donald Trump won 85% of the vote in 2020. “I just don’t know the truth because it’s not open and apparent, and it’s not transparent to us,” said Sauder, 38. “We are trusting people who are trusting the wrong people.” It’s a sentiment now shared by millions of people in the United States after relentless attacks on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by Trump and his allies. Nearly two years after that election, no evidence has emerged to suggest widespread fraud or manipulation while reviews in state after state have upheld the results showing President Joe Biden won.

Full Article: US election conspiracies find fertile ground in conferences | AP News

National: An ex-professor spreads election myths across the U.S., one town at a time | Annie Gowen/The Washington Post

One recent still summer night in this tiny city on the Nebraska prairie, more than 60 people showed up at a senior citizens center to hear attorney David Clements warn of an epidemic of purported election fraud. For two hours, Clements — who has the rumpled look of an academic, though he lost his business school professor’s job last fall for refusing to wear a mask in class — spoke of breached voting machines, voter roll manipulation and ballot stuffing that he falsely claims cost former president Donald Trump victory in 2020. The audience, which included a local minister, a bank teller and farmers in their overalls, gasped in horror or whispered “wow” with each new claim. “We’ve never experienced a national coup,” he told the crowd, standing before red, white and blue signs strung up alongside a bingo board. “And that’s what we had.” Clements, who has no formal training or background in election systems, spent months crisscrossing the back roads in his home state of New Mexico in a battered Buick, trying to convince local leaders not to certify election results. His words had an impact: In June, officials in three New Mexico counties where he made his case either delayed or voted against certification of this year’s primary results, even though there was no credible evidence of problems with the vote.

Full Article: An ex-professor spreads election myths across the U.S., one town at a time – The Washington Post

National: Election Officials Have Been Largely Successful in Deterring Cyber Threats, CISA Official Says | Edward Graham/Nextgov

Increased coordination between federal agencies, election officials, and private sector election vendors has helped deter an influx of cyber threats directed at U.S. voting systems, an election official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said on Thursday during an event hosted by the Election Assistance Commission and Pepperdine University. Mona Harrington, the acting assistant director of CISA’s National Risk Management Center—which includes the agency’s election security team—said that since election systems were designated as critical infrastructure in 2017, “the attacks have become much more sophisticated and the volume of attacks has certainly increased.” But with the partnerships that CISA and election officials have built, along with the products and services currently being used to mitigate potential risks, election officials have many of the tools needed to deter both nation state actors and non-nation state adversaries. Harrington noted that all 50 states have deployed CISA-funded or state-funded intrusion detection sensors in their systems, known as Albert sensors, and that hundreds of election officials and private sector election infrastructure partners have signed up for a range of CISA’s cybersecurity services, from recurring scanning of their systems for known vulnerabilities on internet-connected infrastructure to more in-depth penetration testing.

Source: Election Officials Have Been Largely Successful in Deterring Cyber Threats, CISA Official Says – Nextgov

Biden warns U.S. faces powerful threat from anti-democratic Americans | Yasmeen Abutaleb and Marisa Iati/The Washington Post

President Biden delivered a forceful address Thursday on what he called a dangerous assault on American democracy, warning that “too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal” as “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Biden’s speech, outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, was a remarkable assessment from a sitting president that the fabric of American governance is under serious threat — “we do ourselves no favors to pretend otherwise,” he said. While Biden did not name Republicans other than the former president, he warned of election deniers who have won Republican primaries and those who have sought to overturn legitimate elections. “We are still at our core a democracy — yet history tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader, and the willingness to engage in political violence, is fatal to democracy,” Biden said. “There is no question that the Republican Party is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.” Biden on Thursday appeared to seek a balance between the lofty tones of a presidential address and the sharp, personal criticism of Republicans that many in his party believe is necessary to meet a moment of crisis. While paying tribute to the country’s grand historical traditions, Biden also suggested the upcoming election is a battle between those embracing American values and those trying to destroy them.

Full Article: Biden warns U.S. faces powerful threat from anti-democratic Americans – The Washington Post

National: Here’s what could happen when an election denier becomes a chief election official | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Many of the election deniers running for secretary of state this year have spent their time talking about something they can’t do: “decertifying” the 2020 results. The bigger question — amid concerns about whether they would fairly administer the 2024 presidential election — is exactly what powers they would have if they win in November. Atop the list of the most disruptive things they could do is refusing to certify accurate election results — a nearly unprecedented step that would set off litigation in state and federal court. That has already played out on a smaller scale this year, when a small county in New Mexico refused to certify election results over unfounded fears about election machines, until a state court ordered them to certify. But secretaries of states’ roles in elections stretch far beyond approving vote tallies and certifying results. Many of the candidates want to dramatically change the rules for future elections, too. The Donald Trump-aligned Republican nominees in a number of presidential battleground states have advocated for sweeping changes to election law, with a particular focus on targeting absentee and mail voting in their states — keying off one of Trump’s obsessions.

Full Article: Here’s what could happen when an election denier becomes a chief election official – POLITICO

National: Growing alarm as more election workers leave their posts ahead of Election Day | redreka Schouten/CNN

State and federal officials, along with voting rights advocates, are sounding the alarm about a growing exodus of local election officials as the November midterms draw closer and workers face continued threats and harassment. In Kentucky, 23 of the state’s 120 county election clerks have opted not to seek reelection this year — “an unusually high” rate of departures, Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, told CNN. Five have left their posts in recent weeks, he said. And Adams, who has defended the integrity of the 2020 election, said he reported to the FBI last week a new threat to hang him for “treason.” In Texas, meanwhile, officials have seen a 30% turnover rate among local election officials since 2020, said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state’s office. In one small Texas county, all three election workers recently resigned. The election administrator cited threats as one reason for her resignation. “Our election workers and elections have proved themselves incredibly resilient,” said Larry Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. “But we are really pushing it to the limit.”

Source: Growing alarm as more election workers leave their posts ahead of Election Day – CNNPolitics

National: With 10 weeks until midterms, election deniers are hampering some election preparations | oo Rin Kim, Laura Romero, Patrick Linehan, and Kate Holland/ABC

In Colorado, supporters of Donald Trump seeking evidence of 2020 election fraud have flooded some county offices with so many records requests that officials say they have been unable to perform their primary duties. In Nevada, some election workers have been followed to their cars and harassed with threats. And in Philadelphia, concerns about the potential for violence around Election Day have prompted officials to install bulletproof glass at their ballot-processing center. With ten weeks to go until the 2022 midterms, dozens of state and local officials across the country tell ABC News that preparations for the election are being hampered by onerous public information requests, ongoing threats against election workers, and dangerous misinformation campaigns being waged by activists still intent on contesting the 2020 presidential election. The efforts, many of which are being coordinated at both the national and local level, range from confronting election officials at local government meetings to training volunteers to challenge the vote-counting process on Election Day, according to election officials. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told ABC News he’s concerned that the efforts are a reflection of the prevailing attitude among 2020 election deniers that “the folks running elections in this county or this city are up to no good.”

Full Article: With 10 weeks until midterms, election deniers are hampering some election preparations – ABC News

National: Trump says he would issue full pardons and government apology to rioters who stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 | Mariana Alfaro/The Washington Post

Former president Donald Trump said he would issue full pardons and a government apology to rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and violently attacked law enforcement to stop the democratic transfer of power. “I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he told conservative radio host Wendy Bell on Thursday morning. Such a move would be contingent on Trump running and winning the 2024 presidential election. Supporters of the former president attacked the Capitol as Congress was confirming Joe Biden’s electoral college win in the 2020 election, the worst attack on the seat of democracy in more than two centuries. The insurrection left four people dead, and an officer who had been sprayed with a powerful chemical irritant, Brian D. Sicknick, suffered a stroke and died the next day. About 140 members of law enforcement were injured as rioters attacked them with flagpoles, baseball bats, stun guns, bear spray and pepper spray. As a result, the House impeached Trump for inciting an insurrection. Trump’s comments to Bell came on the same day President Biden is scheduled to deliver a prime-time address in Philadelphia about extremist threats to American democracy and efforts to rescue “the soul of the nation,” and as Trump is battling in court over top-secret documents he apparently took to his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and did not return despite being subpoenaed.

Full Article: Trump says he would issue full pardons and government apology to rioters who stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 – The Washington Post

National: ‘I dread 2024’: America’s local election officials are being pushed to their limits | Kenneth Tran/USA Today

Lackluster funding, infinite work hours, staff shortages, limited resources, abusive phone calls and more: These problems are nothing new for America’s election officials. They have stretched from long before the pandemic to today. Despite it all, they have remained steadfast in the conviction that their job is what maintains American democracy. Failure is not an option. “We don’t stop elections,” said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of North Carolina State’s Board of Elections. “We figure out how to proceed.” Now, however, their patience is being pushed to its limits by new hostility and threats – it’s pushing officials away and it doesn’t bode well for future elections. “I dread 2024, I don’t know how people are gonna be in 2024,” said Tonya Wichman, director of Ohio’s Defiance County Board of Elections. “You can only take so many phone calls that tell you how bad you are at your job.”

Full Article: Local election officials face heavy turnover amid increasing threats

Machine Politics: How America casts and counts its votes | Matt Zdun/Reuters

The United States, like most countries, uses paper ballots to vote. In most cases, voters mark the ballots by hand. In other cases, voters can make their choice on a machine called a ballot marking device, which then prepares a paper printout for submission. The extent to which voters use digital technology to cast their ballots has shifted over time. Paperless electronic voting, touted for its ability to tally votes quickly and accurately, largely decreased in popularity in the United States and European countries from the mid-2000s onward. Countries have turned to paper as the most secure way to audit their elections and detect potential vote tampering. To be sure, machines are still integral to the election process even when votes are cast on paper ballots. Optical scan tabulators count the results. 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. In the weeks after the election, local officials in Florida spent their days looking closely at tiny pieces of paper called “chads” that were still attached to ballots. In counties that used punch-card voting machines, voters would punch out these paper chads with a stylus to indicate their chosen candidate. If the chad was completely punched out from the ballot, a counting machine could tally the vote. The conundrum for election officials arose when the chad was said to be hanging, or still partly attached to the ballot. That raised concerns about whether the voter’s intent had been accurately recorded.

Full Article: Machine Politics: How America casts and counts its votes

Voting machine tampering points to concern for fall election | Christina A. Cassidy and Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

On the last day of voting in Colorado’s June primary, a poll worker sent to wipe down a voting machine found a concerning error message on its screen: “USB device change detected.” The machine, used to mark ballots electronically, was taken out of use and an investigation launched. The message raised concerns that a voter had tried to tamper with it by inserting an off-the-shelf thumb drive. The incident heightened concerns among election officials and security experts that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could inspire some voters to meddle with — or even attempt to sabotage — election equipment. Even unsuccessful breaches, like the apparent one in the county south of Colorado Springs, could become major problems in the November general election, when turnout will be greater and the stakes higher — causing delays at polling places or sowing the seeds of misinformation campaigns. Activists who promote the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump have been traveling the country peddling a narrative that electronic voting machines are being manipulated. They have specifically targeted equipment made by Dominion Voting Systems, which has filed several defamation lawsuits and said that post-election reviews in state after state have shown its tallies to be accurate.

Full Article: Voting machine tampering points to concern for fall election | AP News

National: Copied voting systems files were shared with Trump supporters, election deniers | Jon Swaine , Aaron C. Davis , Amy Gardner and Emma Brown/The Washington Post

Sensitive election system files obtained by attorneys working to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat were shared with election deniers, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post. A Georgia computer forensics firm, hired by the attorneys, placed the files on a server, where company records show they were downloaded dozens of times. Among the downloaders were accounts associated with a Texas meteorologist who has appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show; a podcaster who suggested political enemies should be executed; a former pro surfer who pushed disproven theories that the 2020 election was manipulated; and a self-described former “seduction and pickup coach” who claims to also have been a hacker. Plaintiffs in a long-running federal lawsuit over the security of Georgia’s voting systems obtained the new records from the company, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, under a subpoena to one of its executives. The records include contracts between the firm and the Trump-allied attorneys, notably Sidney Powell. The data files are described as copies of components from election systems in Coffee County, Ga., and Antrim County, Mich. A series of data leaks and alleged breaches of local elections offices since 2020 has prompted criminal investigations and fueled concerns among some security experts that public disclosure of information collected from voting systems could be exploited by hackers and other people seeking to manipulate future elections. Access to U.S. voting system software and other components is tightly regulated, and the government classifies those systems as “critical infrastructure.” The new batch of records shows for the first time how the files copied from election systems were distributed to people in multiple states. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, which is one of the plaintiffs in the Georgia lawsuit, said the records appeared to show the files were handled recklessly. “The implications go far beyond Coffee County or Georgia,” Marks said.

Full Article: Copied voting systems files were shared with Trump supporters, election deniers – The Washington Post

National: Justice Dept. sued to disclose records on threats to election workers | Mike Scarcella/Reuters

The U.S. Justice Department was sued on Thursday by a government watchdog group seeking public records about the task force the agency set up last year to address mounting threats of violence against election workers and state voting administrators. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed the complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit requests details under the Freedom of Information Act about the number of tips the task force has received and how many cases are open or closed. CREW also seeks communication from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco about the department’s work under its Election Threats Task Force, and the identities of the investigative panel’s members. Lawyers for CREW said they are seeking records to show the public actions the task force has “both taken and failed to take to date.”

Full Article: U.S. Justice Dept. sued to disclose records on threats to election workers | Reuters

National: Election officials can’t access federal funding for security as violent threats mount | Kira Lerner/Virginia Mercury

Colorado’s election officials, like so many across the country, faced a surge of violent threats after the 2020 election. Federal authorities are prosecuting a man who pled guilty to threatening a Colorado election official on Instagram, where he wrote: “Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t.” And Colorado police arrested a man accused of calling Secretary of State Jena Griswold and saying that “the angel of death is coming for her.” So when the Colorado secretary of state’s office learned early this year that the U.S. Department of Justice would allow funding through the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program to be used by state and local election offices to combat threats, they submitted an application in March. The office requested $396,000 to pay contractors to monitor social media for threats and to enhance physical security for the secretary of state’s office staff and county clerks through September 2023. In May, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Beall made a presentation to the board that determines grant recipients. “There is a clear threat to Colorado Department of State (CDOS) staff, including the Secretary of State,” Beall wrote in a letter to the Colorado Department of Public Safety, which oversees the grant. “We are, simply stated, facing a threat environment that is unprecedented for election officials and staff.”

Full Article: Election officials can’t access federal funding for security as violent threats mount – Virginia Mercury

National: Election officials brace for onslaught of poll watchers | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

North Carolina’s May primary was “one of the worst elections I’ve ever worked,” said Karen Hebb, the elections director in Henderson County. “It was worse than COVID.”  In addition to long conversations with skeptical voters bringing her misinformation they read on the Internet, Hebb said she and her staff were blindsided by the sheer number of election observers who wanted to watch voting during the primary. There were at least 20 from the Republican Party alone, she said, compared with five or six observers total in the past. “We’ve never had that before,” she said. Hebb stresses she’s fine with having observers. But some of the people watching the primary were disruptive, endlessly questioning workers and demanding to approach tabulators to verify totals, she reported to state officials in a post-election survey. And in one alarming case, Hebb said in an interview with Votebeat, an observer followed an election worker from a voting site to the elections office “to make sure that they actually brought the ballots.” In the wake of the primary, Hebb is one of many local election officials nationwide worried about an onslaught of election observers. She called a special meeting with election workers to discuss the issues that came up during the primary.

Full Article: Poll observer increases have election officials tightening rules – Votebeat: Nonpartisan local reporting on election administration and voting

National: States Are Bracing for Social Media-Enabled Election Violence | Elizabeth L. T. Moore/Bloomberg

State elections officials say they’re seeing an uptick in a new kind of social media-fueled danger to US midterms: online anger that threatens to spill over into real-world violence. In Arizona, online conspiracy theories resulted in so many harassing phone calls to the secretary of state’s office, employees had to take a break from answering. In Michigan, officials have seen such a flood of violent rhetoric online that this week they sent letters to tech company CEOs pleading with them to do more to control their platforms. In Maine, a state where Election Day is associated with patriotic pie-eating, a poll worker last year received a credible death threat on Facebook. Bloomberg reached out to all 50 secretaries of state and spoke with representatives of 12 offices, from Texas to Hawaii. All of those who commented said they’ve seen an increase in online suspicion about the electoral process, which in many states has led to threats for staff or poll workers and resignations of these crucial employees. Narratives that drove the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, such as false claims of voter fraud, have lingered online. The chatter escalated most during primaries in states that had close contests in 2020 or where former US President Donald Trump backed candidates for office. Social media platforms have ramped up their election-related security measures, adding channels for state governments to report posts more directly. But rules on misinformation and harassing content are applied inconsistently, if at all, the officials said.

Full Article: States Are Bracing for Social Media-Enabled Election Violence – Bloomberg

National: New breed of video sites thrive on misinformation and hate | Andrew R.C. Marshall and Joseph Tanfani/Reuters

A day after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York last May, the video-sharing website BitChute was amplifying a far-right conspiracy theory that the massacre was a so-called false flag operation, meant to discredit gun-loving Americans. Three of the top 15 videos on the site that day blamed U.S. federal agents instead of the true culprit: a white-supremacist teenager who had vowed to “kill as many blacks as possible” before shooting 13 people, killing 10. Other popular videos uploaded by BitChute users falsely claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused cancers that “literally eat you” and spread the debunked claim that Microsoft founder Bill Gates caused a global baby-formula shortage. BitChute has boomed as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook tighten rules to combat misinformation and hate speech. An upstart BitChute rival, Odysee, has also taken off. Both promote themselves as free-speech havens, and they’re at the forefront of a fast-growing alternative media system that delivers once-fringe ideas to millions of people worldwide. Searching the two sites on major news topics plunges viewers into a labyrinth of outlandish conspiracy theories, racist abuse and graphic violence. As their viewership has surged since 2019, they have cultivated a devoted audience of mostly younger men, according to data from digital intelligence firm Similarweb. Online misinformation, though usually legal, triggers real-world harm. U.S. election workers have faced a wave of death threats and harassment inspired by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, which also fueled the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot. Reuters interviews with a dozen people accused of terrorizing election workers revealed that some had acted on bogus information they found on BitChute and almost all had consumed content on sites popular among the far-right.

Full Article: SkewTube: New video-sharing sites thrive on misinformation and hate

Rightwing sheriffs’ groups ramp up drives to monitor US midterm elections | Peter Stone/The Guardian

Two groups of rightwing sheriffs that echo some of Donald Trump’s false claims about widespread voting fraud in 2020 are ramping up drives to monitor this year’s elections for potential voting and election fraud. The two Arizona-led groups together boast over 350 sheriffs as members nationwide, and have forged various ties with Texas-based True the Vote, which has a history of making unverified claims of voting fraud, spurring watchdogs and law enforcement veterans to voice alarms of looming threats to voting rights and election workers. The burgeoning sheriffs’ drive to investigate so-called voting fraud was evident at a secretive Arizona meeting on 13 August that drew a crowd of some 200 allies, including former sheriff Richard Mack and current sheriff Mark Lamb, who each lead sheriffs’ groups. The True the Vote chief, Catherine Engelbrecht, arranged the event, Mack told the Guardian. The gathering lasted about seven and a half hours and featured talks by Engelbrecht and Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal county, Arizona, who teamed up in June to create ProtectAmerica.Vote. to promote a larger role for sheriffs in election monitoring, said Mack. “I totally support what they’re doing,” said Mack, who leads the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which has thousands of members around the country, including hundreds of sheriffs. The event, to which Mack invited several of his staff and two former law enforcement officials, provided “more evidence of quite extensive election fraud”, said Mack. “There’s no way anyone in this country should be trusting computers to tabulate votes.” The meeting, which was covered live by the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network, was held at a venue “ that was very surreptitious”, added Mack, former sheriff of Graham county, Arizona.

Full Article: Rightwing sheriffs’ groups ramp up drives to monitor US midterm elections | US midterm elections 2022 | The Guardian

DEF CON Voting Village takes on election conspiracies, disinformation | AJ Vicens/CyberScoop

The DEF CON Voting Village made headlines for giving hackers access to voting machines and putting election vulnerabilities on full display when it first launched in 2017. But in the era of the “Big Lie,” the unfounded theory of election rigging in 2020, the village has another — and possibly more challenging — mission. “Today, the main thing is still the same — tell what are the real vulnerabilities — but fight against conspiracy theories, misinformation, claims of hacks that didn’t happen, claims of weirdness that didn’t happen,” said Harri Hursti, the co-founder of the Voting Village and a pioneer election security researcher. This year at DEF CON, which wrapped up Sunday in Las Vegas, the Voting Village took place against a backdrop of perhaps the most contentious time for election administrators in decades. Aside from working through COVID-19 modifications, public questioning of election administration has reached fever pitch. Election offices are, at times, buried in records requests looking to expose fraud. Elections officials in Colorado and Michigan stand accused of giving unauthorized access to voting infrastructure in a quixotic effort to prove the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Election officials from Georgia in June detailed the threats they’d received from Trump supporters, a disturbingly common report across the country over the last two years.

Full Article: DEF CON Voting Village takes on election conspiracies, disinformation

National: GOP operatives’ troubling trend of copying election systems | Tim Starks/The Washington Post

Donald Trump-allied attorneys directed a team of computer experts to copy sensitive data from Georgia election systems, part of a broader trend of assorted GOP efforts to copy such data, The Post reported Monday. … The copies of Dominion voting software in several locations would include “object code,” or the language that allows machines to understand the underlying source code, said University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman. Such code is mostly straightforward to reverse-engineer. “The format is a speed bump for someone wanting to understand or exploit the system, not a real roadblock,” Halderman told me. Halderman said election security is too often a game of “security by obscurity,” one where everything is kept secret until suddenly “the cat’s out of the bag” with, say, imaged voting systems making their way into the broader public. That creates a period of heightened vulnerability, he said, where the bad guys have the edge over good guys who have to spend a lot of time working to patch flaws.

Full Article: GOP operatives’ troubling trend of copying election systems – The Washington Post

National: Poll worker recruitment efforts are in full swing for midterms amid shortage | Barbara Rodriguez/The 19th

When Power the Polls launched in 2020, the nonpartisan nonprofit aimed to recruit 250,000 people to sign up as poll workers around the country during the COVID-19 pandemic. The response was overwhelming. Power the Polls, through its partnerships with about 200 nonprofit organizations and businesses, estimates it recruited more than 700,000 prospective poll workers. Jane Slusser, program manager for Power the Polls, said 97 percent of those sign-ups were people who had never been a poll worker before. She said afterward, many expressed an interest in doing the work again. “Overwhelmingly, people were like, ‘Now I’m a poll worker for life. It was a tough day, but it was one of the most rewarding things I ever did,’” she said. Poll workers — the people, sometimes paid and sometimes not, who help voters check in, manage lines, troubleshoot equipment or assist with office duties — have historically been older women, though data is limited. Power the Polls wants to help election administrators recruit poll workers again amid new challenges. The election system is being tested in the face of lies spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies about widespread voter fraud, and members of the majority-women election official workforce have faced threats.

Full Article: Poll worker recruitment efforts are in full swing for midterms amid shortage

National: Republicans Turn Against the League of Women Voters | Megan O’Matz/ProPublica

For decades, the League of Women Voters played a vital but largely practical role in American politics: tending to the information needs of voters by hosting debates and conducting candidate surveys. While it wouldn’t endorse specific politicians, it quietly supported progressive causes. The group was known for clipboards, not confrontation; for being respected, not reviled. But those quiet days are now over, a casualty of the volatile political climate of the last few years and the league’s goal of being relevant to a new generation. n 2018, the league’s CEO was arrested, along with hundreds of other protesters, for crowding a Senate office building to demand lawmakers reject Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative accused of sexual harassment. Two years later, the league dissolved its chapter in Nevada after the state president penned an op-ed in July 2020 accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy for opposing gerrymandering in red states while “harassing” the league in Nevada over its activism on the issue.

Full Article: Republicans Turn Against the League of Women Voters — ProPublica

National: Trump supporters’ threats to judge spur democracy concerns | Gary Fields and Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

Hundreds of federal judges face the same task every day: review an affidavit submitted by federal agents and approve requests for a search warrant. But for U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, the fallout from his decision to approve a search warrant has been far from routine. He has faced a storm of death threats since his signature earlier this month cleared the way for the FBI to search former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as part of a probe into whether he inappropriately removed sensitive materials from the White House. Reinhart’s home address was posted on right-wing sites, along with antisemitic slurs. The South Florida synagogue he attends canceled its Friday night Shabbat services in the wake of the uproar. Trump has done little to lower the temperature among his supporters, decrying the search as political persecution and calling on Reinhart to recuse himself in the case because he has previously made political donations to Democrats. Reinhart has also, however, contributed to Republicans. The threats against Reinhart are part of a broader attack on law enforcement, particularly the FBI, by Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the search. But experts warn that the focus on a judge, coming amid an uptick in threats to the judiciary in general, is dangerous for the rule of law in the U.S. and the country’s viability as a democracy. “Threats against judges fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities strike at the very core of our democracy,” U.S. Second Circuit Judge Richard J. Sullivan, chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on Judicial Security, said in a statement issued recently in the aftermath of the search. “Judges should not have to fear retaliation for doing their jobs.”

Full Article: Trump supporters’ threats to judge spur democracy concerns | AP News