National

Election officials are confronting a wave of threats and security challenges coming from a troubling source: inside the election system itself. In interviews on the sidelines of the National Association of Secretaries of State’s summer conference, a dozen chief election administrators detailed a growing number of “insider threats” leading to attempted or successful election security breaches aided by local officials. The most prominent was in Colorado, where a county clerk was indicted for her role in facilitating unauthorized access to voting machines. But there have been similar instances elsewhere, including in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio. Beyond security breaches, other insider efforts to undermine elections have sprouted. In New Mexico last month, the board of commissioners in Otero County — a predominantly Republican county along the state’s southern border with Texas — refused to certify primary election results, citing unfounded claims about the security of voting machines that are rooted in conspiracy theories about hacked election equipment from the 2020 election. “What’s clear is this is a nationally coordinated effort,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. “It’s multi-year, multi-faceted … not just pressuring election officials, but pressuring local elected officials as well.” Election officials fear the handful of publicly disclosed incidents over the last two years are only the start of a wave ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections.

Full Article: Election officials fear copycat attacks as ‘insider threats’ loom – POLITICO

Election Officials Confront Cyber Threats, False Claims Ahead of Midterms | Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

Election officials on the front lines of defending voting systems say they are preparing for a range of challenges ahead of the fall midterms, as they seek to ward off cyber threats and restore voter confidence after a flood of unsubstantiated election-fraud claims. On the cybersecurity front, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea pose persistent threats along with other concerns including ransomware, said Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—the U.S. government’s top cyber unit. Federal and state officials said they aren’t only guarding against cyber threats, but also protecting physical access to voting systems. “We’re in a mode of constant vigilance,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, whose office in late June issued a third round of cyber- and physical-security requirements, including camera surveillance of election equipment, for the state’s county election boards. The nation’s secretaries of state, who typically oversee state election systems, met with Ms. Easterly and other federal cybersecurity officials over the past few days at a hotel in Baton Rouge, as part of their annual bipartisan summer gathering.

Full Article: Election Officials Confront Cyber Threats, False Claims Ahead of Midterms – WSJ

National: Trump’s 2020 outrage drives fear of ‘insider’ election threats | Ines Kagubare/The Hill

Former President Trump’s campaign to undermine the 2020 election is fueling concerns over midterm election security, with experts warning of “insider” threats from the very officials charged with guarding the vote. Hundreds of GOP candidates in federal and state races have embraced his false claims about the election, including at least 20 Republican candidates running for secretary of state, according to an NPR analysis. Trump’s election denial movement has raised concerns among U.S. officials and experts who fear the conspiracy theories could undermine the legitimacy of future elections. “I think that’s kind of a new element to the threat landscape of elections,” said William Adler, a senior technologist in elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “I think that the new risk is the risk of insider threats.” Arizona is among the states where false claims about the 2020 election are the center of this year’s campaigns.

Full Article: Trump’s 2020 outrage drives fear of ‘insider’ election threats | The Hill

National: CISA flags election system threats ahead of midterms | Susan Miller/GCN

To help state and local officials with election security ahead of the midterm elections, organizations are issuing advice for supply chain risks, insider threats and strengthening election systems’ cyber defenses. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on June 30 released information on mitigating supply chain risks to election infrastructure, including hardware, software, services and paper supplies. CISA advises election offices to deploy a robust supply chain risk management plan that identifies the security concerns with products and components they must buy. Suppliers should be identified and continually monitored to ensure they meet the latest supply chain management security policies and procedures. Election officials should also continually monitor their vendors, anticipate higher costs and longer lead times for products and be sure their budgets and processes can accommodate delays. The security agency also recently warned of insider threats to election systems. Whether by accident, through negligence or intentional, insider threats risk the confidentiality, integrity and availability of election systems and information. Electronic threats include viruses, data breaches, denial of service attacks, malware or attacks on unpatched software – as well as the spread of election-related mis-, dis- and mal-information, CISA said in a recent guide.

Source: CISA flags election system threats ahead of midterms – GCN

National: Safeguarding the Midterms: Election leaders reveal top concerns ahead of November | Mark Albert/Hearst Television

Just four months before Election Day, misinformation and disinformation, threats toward election workers, and a lack of voter confidence in America’s democratic system are the top concerns among state election leaders. The National Investigative Unit interviewed top election officials from 19 states during the annual summer conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), held this year in Louisiana’s state capital. The interviews provide the latest evidence that falsehoods about the 2020 election are still roiling U.S. politics nearly two years after the presidential election, which Joe Biden won. Federal agencies – including those helmed by appointees of former President Donald Trump and now, President Joe Biden, have repeatedly said there was no widespread fraud that would have changed the results of the election, which they deemed “secure.” In February 2021, secretaries of state from both parties told Hearst Television there was no fraud of sufficient scale and scope to have altered Biden’s victory in their states. Not one secretary disagreed.

Full Article: Safeguarding the Midterms: Election leaders reveal top concerns ahead of November

National: Poll workers are short-staffed, under attack — and quietly defending democracy | Amy Sherman and Hana Stepnick/PolitiFact

There’s no doubt about it: For election officials across the country, recruiting poll workers is more challenging than ever. COVID-19 made people with health worries want to stay home. Rampant misinformation about election fraud spurred vitriol and even death threats against election workers. Long hours and paltry pay for a seasonal job have never been that enticing. Election officials are struggling to recruit workers, but people who are taking the jobs — some for the first time — say they’re doing so out of a commitment to their country and to democracy itself. PolitiFact interviewed multiple poll workers nationwide and found they were undeterred by threats or falsehoods. Some poll workers are inspired to do this work by new laws that make it harder to vote, or by the way some politicians refuse to certify elections or spread falsehoods about voting. Democracy in the balance motivated Robin Levin, a retired schoolteacher, to become a newly trained poll worker in Florida’s Broward County. “Democracy has been challenged, and it’s all based around voting,” Levin said. “Our whole democracy is voting, and when you lose voting, you have no democracy. That’s my biggest fear. That is my whole reason to get more involved.”

Full Article: PolitiFact | Poll workers are short-staffed, under attack — and quietly defending democracy

The Results Are In: U.S. Moves Toward Paper-Based Elections | Andrew Adams/Governent Technology

Most voting systems are designed to last 10 to 20 years. In the 2022 elections, 24 states will be using voting machines that are more than 10 years old, according to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice. In the coming years, hundreds of jurisdictions around the country will be in the market for new election technology.
Increasingly, local election authorities are turning to ballot marking devices or recommitting to paper ballots marked by hand. In 2022, 92.2 percent of voters will live in a jurisdiction using one of these voting methods. Peoria County, Ill., a mid-sized county in central Illinois, held its primary elections on June 28, marking the halfway point through the 2022 primary season. This was the first election in Peoria with paper ballots in more than 10 years. Prior to this year, they had been using Hart InterCivic eSlate, a type of direct recording electronic (DRE) device. These types of devices record votes to electronic memory. In the 2012 midterms, about one-third of voters lived in jurisdictions using these machines, but they have fallen out of favor across the board. This year, 7.5 percent of voters live in a jurisdiction that uses them, according to data compiled by Verified Voting.

Full Article: The Results Are In: U.S. Moves Toward Paper-Based Elections

National: Election officials face security challenges before midterms | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Election officials preparing for the upcoming midterms face a myriad of threats, both foreign and domestic, as they look to protect voting systems and run a smooth election while fighting a wave of misinformation that has been undermining public confidence in U.S. elections. The nation’s top state election officials gathered Thursday for the start of their annual summer conference, with a long list of challenges that begins with securing their voting systems. While a top concern heading into the 2020 presidential election was Russia or another hostile nation waging a disruptive cyberattack, the landscape has expanded to include ransomware, politically motivated hackers and insider threats. Over the last year, a small number of security breaches have been reported at local election offices in which authorities are investigating whether office staff improperly accessed or provided improper access to sensitive voting technology. Jen Easterly, who leads the nation’s cybersecurity agency, said Russia, China and North Korea remain “very dynamic and complex cyber threats” and that criminal gangs pushing ransomware were also a concern. But she noted election security officials could not afford to prioritize one over the other.

Full Article: Election officials face security challenges before midterms | AP News

National: Insider threats a growing concern for election security efforts | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

While state and local election officials deserve a “huge amount of credit” for improving their defenses against cyberthreats like ransomware and foreign-backed actors, top officials from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Thursday that insider threats — from individuals within election administration offices — are an increasing concern. Speaking at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, CISA Director Jen Easterly said election officials need to focus on an entire “landscape” of threats. “If we focus too intently on one set of threats, we are very likely to miss those coming from another direction,” she told reporters. “Insider threats can do malicious things. They can also pose malicious physical threats.” In recent months, breaches of election equipment have come under investigation across the country, following incidents in which unauthorized third parties have been given access to vote-tabulation devices, servers and other technology assets in attempts to prove baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Full Article: Insider threats a growing concern for election security efforts

National: ‘It’s a sham’: fears over Trump loyalists’ ‘election integrity’ drive | Peter Stone/The Guardian

A conservative group called the America Project that boasts Donald Trump loyalists and “big lie” pushers Roger Stone and Michael Flynn as key advisers, has begun a self-styled “election integrity” drive to train activists in election canvassing and poll-watching, sparking fears from voting rights watchdogs about voter intimidation. Patrick Byrne, the multimillionaire co-founder of the America Project, has said he has donated almost $3m to launch the drive, dubbed “Operation Eagles Wings”, with a focus on eight states including Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Trump lost, plus Texas and Florida, which he won. The drive was unveiled in late February at a press event where Byrne touted plans to educate “election reform activists” to handle election canvassing, grassroots work and fundraising “to expose shenanigans at the ballot box” in what has echoes of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and could become a sequel to those charges. Byrne, for instance, has said the operation’s mission is to “make sure that there are no repeats of the errors that happened in the 2020 election”, and stressed the “need to protect the voting process from election meddlers who care only about serving crooked special interest groups that neither respect nor value the rule of law”.

Full Article: ‘It’s a sham’: fears over Trump loyalists’ ‘election integrity’ drive | US news | The Guardian

National: Despite rebukes, Trump’s legal brigade is thriving | Heidi Przybyla/Politico

Juli Haller was part of Donald Trump’s legal brigade in Michigan, filing a lawsuit alongside the ubiquitous Sidney Powell that claimed absentee vote counts were likely manipulated by a computer algorithm developed by allies of deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez. The lawsuit was quickly deemed baseless, and she was among nine attorneys ordered by a federal judge to pay the city of Detroit and state of Michigan’s legal fees and referred for possible disbarment. In a blistering rebuke, Judge Linda V. Parker called it a “historic and profound abuse of the judicial process.” But unlike Rudy Giuliani, whose law license was suspended in New York and Washington, D.C., for championing similar cases, or Haller’s own co-counsel, Powell, whose law license is at risk in Texas, Haller is going strong. She has gained a robust client roster that includes two alleged members of the far-right vigilante group the Oath Keepers who are accused of fueling the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Haller’s trajectory — from rebuked purveyor of baseless claims to a go-to attorney for MAGA extremists — infuriates many liberal activists, including some groups who are targeting the lawyers for discipline, and alarms some nonpartisan specialists in legal ethics. They say those who helped legitimize the former president’s lies should not be allowed to use it as a foundation to build their legal practices, lest it serve as an incentive to profit from ever more outlandish claims that shake the confidence of Americans in the integrity of U.S. elections and endanger democracy.

Full Article: Despite rebukes, Trump’s legal brigade is thriving – POLITICO

National: Taking Trump’s lead, even fringe candidates who lost badly are claiming fraud | Stephen Fowler/NPR

When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp overwhelmingly won the Republican primary in Georgia on May 24, his chief opponent former Sen. David Perdue was quick to admit it was over. “Everything I said about Brian Kemp was true, but here’s the other thing I said was true: he is a much better choice than Stacey Abrams,” he said shortly after polls closed, referring to the matchup this fall between Kemp and Democrat Abrams. “And so we are going to get behind our governor.” But another one of his opponents felt something was off. “I want y’all to know that I do not concede,” Kandiss Taylor said in a video posted to social media. “I do not. And if the people who did this and cheated are watching, I do not concede.” Kemp won Georgia’s primary with about 74% of the vote. Perdue, who had the backing of former President Donald Trump, earned about 22% of the vote. And Taylor? Just 3.4%.

Full Article: Taking Trump’s lead, even fringe candidates who lost badly are claiming fraud : NPR

National: Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington | Steven Lee Myers and Eileen Sullivan/The New York Times

The memo that reached the top of the Department of Homeland Security in September could not have been clearer about its plan to create a board to monitor national security threats caused by the spread of dangerous disinformation. The department, it said, “should not attempt to be an all-purpose arbiter of truth in the public arena.” Yet when Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas announced the disinformation board in April, Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators denounced it as exactly that, calling it an Orwellian attempt to stifle dissenting views. So did some critics from the left, who questioned the powers that such an office might wield in the hands of future Republican administrations. Within weeks, the new board was dismantled — put on “pause,” officially — undone in part by forces it was meant to combat, including distortions of the board’s intent and powers. There is wide agreement across the federal government that coordinated disinformation campaigns threaten to exacerbate public health emergencies, stoke ethnic and racial divisions and even undermine democracy itself. The board’s fate, however, has underscored how deeply partisan the issue has become in Washington, making it nearly impossible to consider addressing the threat.

Full Article: Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington – The New York Times

Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Republicans and other conservative groups are undertaking a huge effort to recruit election workers, a push that could install people with unfounded doubts about the 2020 election in key positions in voting precincts where they could exert considerable power over elections. At the forefront of this push is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on Donald Trump’s legal team in 2020 and played a key role in his effort to overturn the election. Over the last few months, Mitchell has held “election integrity summits” in several battleground states, convening groups and citizens who continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen. The summits offer in-depth training on how to monitor election offices and how to work elections. At a mid-June summit in North Carolina, Mitchell mocked the term “election denier” and said “whether the outcome was correct, that’s all I deny”. Voter fraud is extremely rare and there was no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, underscores how Trump and allies are capitalizing on now deeply seeded Republican doubt about Joe Biden’s victory and are targeting key election offices and jobs that play a considerable role in determining how ballots are cast and counted. The summits are a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a group with close ties to Trump’s political operation, and where Mitchell is a senior legal fellow. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is a senior partner at CPI.

Full Article: Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | US voting rights | The Guardian

National: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security | Carl Smith/Governing

Controversy over election outcomes is not new. Overall voter confidence that votes were properly counted was lower after presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 than it was in 2020. What is new is the level of overt hostility toward the people who administer elections, manifested in an ongoing pattern of threats to their personal safety. Recent congressional hearings have included emotional accounts from election officials at all levels, from threats to the family members of a senior official to the crippling fallout when an election worker was falsely accused of fraud, by name, by the former president and his attorney. Spurred on by misinformation, including continued assertions from campaigning politicians that a national election was somehow “stolen,” members of the public have not backed off from such harassment. A Brennan Center poll of election officials, conducted more than two years after the 2020 election, found that one in six had experienced threats. Almost 80 percent said that threats had increased in recent years, and 30 percent knew election workers who left their jobs because they felt unsafe. More than three-fourths felt the federal government should be doing more to support them, and one in three said the same about their local government. Members of the election and law enforcement communities have joined together to help fill this void, forming the nonpartisan Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE).

Full Article: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security

National: How the Supreme Court could radically reshape elections for president and Congress | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday that it has agreed to hear a case next term that could upend election laws across the country with the potential endorsement of a fringe legal theory about how much power state legislatures have over the running of congressional and presidential elections. The case, called Moore v. Harper, is centered on newly drawn maps of voting districts for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the next U.S. House of Representatives. Republican state lawmakers want to resurrect a map that North Carolina’s state courts struck down, finding that the map approved by the GOP-controlled legislature violated multiple provisions in the state’s constitution by giving Republican candidates an unfair advantage through partisan gerrymandering. A court-drawn map has been put in place instead for this year’s midterm elections. In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.

Full Article: U.S. Supreme Court takes on the independent state legislature theory : NPR

National: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations | Suzanne Smalley/CyberScoop

U.S. Cyber Command wants more tech companies and others on the front lines of the global fight to secure the internet to share more cybersecurity intelligence so that the organization can improve its defensive capabilities, Cyber Command Executive Director Dave Frederick said in an interview Monday. Frederick said Cyber Command regularly shares information it gleans during so-called “hunt forward” operations, defensive cyber missions carried out alongside partners, but needs more private companies to fully report cyber incidents so that Cyber Command can learn from them. Frederick, who was speaking during an industry webinar organized by Billington CyberSecurity, said the 27 hunt forward operations Cyber Command has conducted in the past two years have empowered partner countries to “immediately strengthen the defenses of their networks” and have given Cyber Command “unique insights into adversary malware which we then bring home.” Those insights inform not only Department of Defense cyber defense strategy, but also are shared with the private sector, he said. “We’re able to share the indicators of compromise, new samples of malware that we discover from hunt forward, with the broader cybersecurity community, and they’re able to then build signatures to detect that malware and basically disrupt adversary operations targeting the U.S. civil sector,” Frederick said. “It’s almost like giving an antidote to a virus, so it’s really turned out to be a great model.”

Full Article: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations

National: Violent Threats to Election Workers Are Common. Prosecutions are Not. | Michael Wines and Eliza Fawcett/The New York Times

“Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t.” In August, 42-year-old Travis Ford of Lincoln, Neb., posted those words on the personal Instagram page of Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and chief election official of Colorado. In a post 10 days later, Mr. Ford told Ms. Griswold that her security detail was unable to protect her, then added: “This world is unpredictable these days … anything can happen to anyone.” Mr. Ford paid dearly for those words. Last week, in U.S. District Court in Lincoln, he pleaded guilty to making a threat with a telecommunications device, a felony that can carry up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But a year after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland established the federal Election Threats Task Force, almost no one else has faced punishment. Two other cases are being prosecuted, but Mr. Ford’s guilty plea is the only case the task force has successfully concluded out of more than 1,000 it has evaluated. Public reports of prosecutions by state and local officials are equally sparse, despite an explosion of intimidating and even violent threats against election workers, largely since former President Donald J. Trump began spreading the lie that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Colorado alone has forwarded at least 500 threats against election workers to the task force, Ms. Griswold said.

Full Article: Election Workers Don’t Feel Safe Despite Federal Effort to Combat Threats – The New York Times

National: The People v. Donald Trump – The evidence for a possible criminal case against the former president is piling up | David French/The Atlantic

From the moment the attack on the Capitol began, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s moral culpability was clear. That mob would never have assembled on the National Mall but for Trump’s decision to relentlessly lie about the results of the 2020 election. His legal culpability, however, was more ambiguous. We did not possess any evidence that he directly coordinated with the rioters prior to the invasion of the Capitol, and although his speech to the mob on January 6 itself admonished his followers to “fight like hell” and warned them that “you will never take back our country with weakness,” it also contained an explicit statement that they should march to the Capitol to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. Also hovering over the legal analysis was a prudential calculation. Former presidents shouldn’t be prosecuted under novel legal theories. If the government is going to prosecute, it should bring a case that’s easy to justify under existing precedent. Otherwise, the prosecution itself could be dangerous, further fracturing and destabilizing an already fragile American political culture. Those considerations are precisely why Trump’s conduct in the case of Georgia had seemed more obviously to involve potential criminal liability than his actions on January 6. In Georgia’s case, Trump was recorded telling Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” and then explicitly threatening Raffensperger with criminal sanctions if he didn’t accede to the president’s demand.

Full Article: The People v. Donald Trump – The Atlantic

Editorial: It’s Hard to Overstate the Danger of the Voting Case the Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

Michigan: Sheriff’s investigators used ‘scare tactics’ to grill county clerks on 2020 election | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

A deputy and a private investigator working with Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf made unannounced visits last year to local election officials’ offices to question them about the 2020 presidential vote. Multiple clerks in Barry County said Leaf’s department used what they viewed as “scare tactics” as it examined and advanced unproven claims of fraud in the last presidential election. State authorities, including the Michigan State Police, are currently investigating whether those working with Leaf, a Republican, gained improper access to vote-counting machines that could have violated the law and compromised voting equipment in the battleground state. Some election clerks in Barry County said they believe their conversations with Leaf’s investigators — one of whom identified himself as a forensic auditor — were secretly recorded and said they were told not to inform other clerks about the probe, according to a series of interviews with officials in the county and emails obtained by The Detroit News through an open records request. “I asked if they were investigating all of the township & city clerks & was told yes, and I am to be questioned last,” Barry County Clerk Pam Palmer emailed a lawyer in June 2021. “They have purposely asked the clerks to not say anything to each other or myself because they want the element of surprise.”

Full Article: Sheriff Dar Leaf’s investigators used ‘element of surprise’ to grill Michigan clerks on 2020 election

Mother-daughter election workers targeted by Trump say there’s ‘nowhere’ they feel safe | Adam Edelman/NBC

In harrowing, emotional and painful detail, a mother-daughter duo of Georgia election workers described during Tuesday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing how a mob of Donald Trump supporters came after them, online and in person, after having gobbled up a debunked conspiracy theory about their actions on Election Day 2020. As a result, their lives will never be the same, the two women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, said during Tuesday’s hearing. “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman, who along with her daughter was aggressively targeted by conspiracy theorists in the weeks after the 2020 election, said during taped testimony. Parts of her never-before-seen interview were played toward the end of Tuesday’s hearing, as she sat behind her daughter in the committee room. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one,” Freeman said. “He targeted me. A proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of a pandemic.”

Full Article: Election workers targeted by Trump, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, say there’s ‘nowhere’ they feel safe

Trump’s false election claims made it tougher to talk about election security | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Election security efforts kicked into high gear after the 2016 election — fueled by Russian interference in that year’s presidential contest. Then 2020 happened. The baseless claims of hacking and fraud that former president Donald Trump and his allies spread after his 2020 loss have polluted conversations about election security ever since, making it far harder to talk about legitimate dangers to the voting process. Trump allies have routinely misrepresented legitimate security concerns to serve their own ends. They’ve also co-opted the language of election security to promote wild conspiracy theories and degrade public faith in the democratic process. They’ve claimed to have found digital vulnerabilities and back doors in voting machines that make no sense to experts who’ve studied those machines. They’ve conducted vote audits that violate all audit protocols and render election machines too insecure to be used again. The result: Talking about genuine election security concerns has become a tortuous process as experts try — usually in vain — to ensure nothing they say will be mischaracterized.

Full Article: Trump’s false election claims made it tougher to talk about election security – The Washington Post

National: Did Trump believe his big lie? It’s irrelevant to proving his guilt. | Ryan Goodman, Norman Eisen and Barbara McQuade/The Washington Post

ormer prosecutors and other experts essentially agree that proving criminal intent poses one of the biggest legal challenges to indicting former president Donald Trump for his role in the attacks on the 2020 election. Mens rea, Latin for guilty mind, is required to convict. This generally means that the offender must have acted purposely, knowingly, recklessly or negligently in committing the criminal act. It’s tempting, in assessing Trump’s state of mind, to focus on whether he genuinely believed his assertion that the presidential election was “stolen” — that he had beaten Joe Biden and that therefore his subsequent efforts were merely means well within his power aimed at setting things right. If you can prove that he did actually know he lost the election — that it was not “stolen” from him — you go a long way toward clearing that criminal-intent hurdle. Certainly, the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 is amassing evidence that Trump knew he had lost. Numerous Trump aides and lawyers have attested to this before the committee. But so what. For a number of the possible crimes the committee has identified, it doesn’t matter what Trump believed about the election. Focusing on that aspect misses the true test of criminal intent. He still had no legal right to use forged electoral certificates or to pressure election officials in Georgia to “find 11,780 votes” that did not exist, or to engage in other extralegal means to try to hold onto power. That includes pressuring the vice president to assume powers he didn’t have. State and federal criminal laws prohibit these things. Vigilante justice is against the law, even if you (wrongly) believe you are a victim.

Full Article: Did Trump believe his big lie? It’s irrelevant to proving his guilt. – The Washington Post

Ignoring the Jan. 6 hearings? Michael Luttig explains why you shouldn’t. | Dan Balz/The Washington Post

J. Michael Luttig spoke softly and sometimes haltingly when he testified Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His understated presentation belied the five-alarm fire that was his written statement — a loud and clear warning to a country whose democracy, he said, is on “a knife’s edge.” Luttig was there because he had advised Vice President Mike Pence that Pence could not legally do what President Donald Trump wanted him to do, which was to interject himself in the process of ratifying the electoral count on Jan. 6 and prepare the ground to have the election overturned. But the former federal appellate court judge far more than demolished the legal arguments Trump had bought into. His prepared statement was a clear-and-present-danger document, describing the fraught state of American democracy, the war that rages internally, and the role Trump and his followers have played to bring us to this moment. Jan. 6, Luttig said, was a war within a broader war over the future of the country, “a war irresponsibly instigated by the former president and his political allies, and his supporters.” The war rages today, he added, and “as a political matter of fact, only the party that instigated this war over our democracy can bring an end to this war.”

Full Article: Ignoring the Jan. 6 hearings? Michael Luttig explains why you shouldn’t. – The Washington Post

National: Election, law enforcement officials launch group to combat threats against voting process | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

A group of 32 current and former election and law-enforcement officials on Thursday announced the formation of a group aimed at tamping down threats against poll workers and voters. The new Committee for Safe and Secure Elections says it will attempt to connect local election administrators with their counterparts in police and sheriff’s departments in hopes of preventing more threats, harassment and acts of violence that’ve hounded the voting process in recent years. The group, which is led by Neal Kelley, a former registrar of voters in Orange County, California, describes itself as a “cross-partisan” effort, and counts among its members officials from many other states, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin. The committee also includes several current and former federal officials involved in securing elections, including Kim Wyman, a former Washington secretary of state who now leads election-security operations at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Full Article: Election, law enforcement officials launch group to combat threats against voting process

National: Trump campaign documents show fake electors were concerted, planned effort | Rosalind S. Helderman/The Washington Post

The convening of the electoral college on Dec. 14, 2020, was supposed to mark the end of the wild, extended presidential election that year. But when the day arrived, a strange thing happened. In seven swing states won by Joe Biden, when the Democrat’s electors assembled to formally elect him president, Trump supporters showed up, too, ready to declare that their man had actually won. “The electors are already here — they’ve been checked in,” a state police officer told the group in Michigan, according to a video of the encounter, as he barred the Republicans from the Capitol in a state Biden won by more than 154,000 votes. In Nevada, a state Biden had won by about 33,600 votes, a photo distributed by the state Republican Party showed Trump supporters squeezing around an undersize picnic table dressed up with a bit of bunting, preparing to sign formal certificates declaring that they were “the duly elected and qualified” electors of their state. At the time, the gatherings seemed a slapdash, desperate attempt to mimic President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede. But internal campaign emails and memos reveal that the convening of the fake electors was apparently a much more concerted strategy, intended to give Vice President Mike Pence a reason to declare that the outcome of the election was somehow in doubt on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was to preside over the congressional counting of the electoral college votes.

Full Article: Trump campaign documents show fake electors were concerted, planned effort – The Washington Post

National: Election officials worry about their safety ahead of midterms | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

When US intelligence and national security officials gathered at a classified facility in April to speak with election officials around the country, there was no burning new intelligence to share about cyber threats to American democracy. The briefing covered Russia’s war on Ukraine and foreign and domestic sources of disinformation about US elections, according to three people familiar with the briefing. But there was a striking change from pre-2020 briefings: It touched on violent threats to election officials that stem from conspiracy theories about the voting process. Physical security concerns have “really ramped up since 2020 because of threats that we’ve seen to state and local officials across the country,” said Kim Wyman, the top election security official at the federal US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has encouraged election workers to report threats to law enforcement and is hiring more staff to advise election officials on physical threats. Many of the thousands of local election officials in the US are living with a new reality as the midterm elections approach: They have spent countless hours rebutting false claims from former President Donald Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen while wondering about their personal safety and trying to prepare for future elections on a limited budget.

Full Article: Election officials worry about their safety ahead of midterms – CNNPolitics

National: US is worried about Russia using new efforts to exploit divisions in 2022 midterms | Edward-Isaac Dovere/CNNPolitics

Homeland and national security officials are worried about how Russia could significantly exploit US divisions over the November midterms, considering scenarios like Russia staging smaller hacks of local election authorities — done with the deliberate purpose of being noticed — and then using that to seed more conspiracies about the integrity of American elections. These efforts, the officials said, would be designed to dovetail with the false doubts about the 2020 presidential election spread by former President Donald Trump and many of his allies. The five current and former US officials who spoke to CNN stressed that such a scenario remains hypothetical. Although US elections have become more secure in recent years, officials say that an atmosphere of distrust in America’s elections, coupled with the sheer number of local election systems, means there’s no way to truly be ready for such a convergence of Russian asymmetric warfare techniques. Administration officials agree with local election officials that the problem goes beyond inevitable security shortfalls. Current and former officials say little has been done to inform, let alone convince, American voters that Russia is trying to attack US elections again.

Full Article: US is worried about Russia using new efforts to exploit divisions in 2022 midterms – CNNPolitics

National: Amid Jan. 6 Revelations, Election Lies Still Dominate the G.O.P. | Jonathan Weisman/The New York Times