National

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

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

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.

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

Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy | Francesca Tripodi/WIRED

Google’s aesthetic has always been rooted in a clean appearance—a homepage free of advertising and pop-up clutter, adorned only with a signature “doodle” decorating its name. Part of why many users love Google is its sleek designs and ability to return remarkably accurate results. Yet the simplicity of Google’s homepage is deceptively static. Overtime, the way that the corporation returns information has shifted ever so slightly. These incremental changes go largely unnoticed by the millions of users who rely on the search engine daily, but it has fundamentally changed the information seeking processes—and not necessarily for the better. When Google first launched, queries returned a simple list of hyperlinked websites. Slowly, that format changed. First Google launched AdWords, allowing businesses to buy space at the top and tailoring returns to maximize product placement. By the early 2000s it was correcting spelling, providing summaries of the news under the headlines, and anticipating our queries with autocomplete. In 2007 it started Universal Search, bringing together relevant information across formats (news, images, video). And in 2012 it introduced Knowledge Graph, providing a snapshot that sits separate from the returns, a source of knowledge that many of us have come to rely on exclusively when it comes to quick searches.

Full Article: Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy | WIRED

Michigan plot to breach voting machines points to a national trend | atrick Marley and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

Eight months after the 2020 presidential election, Robin Hawthorne did not expect anyone to ask for her township’s voting machines. The election had gone smoothly, she said, just as others had that she had overseen for 17 years as the Rutland Charter Township clerk in rural western Michigan. But now a sheriff’s deputy and investigator were in her office, asking her about her township’s three vote tabulators, suggesting that they somehow had been programmed with a microchip to shift votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and asking her to hand one over for inspection. “What the heck is going on?” she recalled thinking. The surprise visit may have been an “out-of-the-blue thing,” as Hawthorne described it, but it was one element of a much broader effort by figures who deny the outcome of the 2020 vote to access voting machines in a bid to prove fraud that experts say does not exist. In states across the country, including Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia, attempts to inappropriately access voting machines have spurred investigations. They have also sparked concern among election authorities that, while voting systems are broadly secure, breaches by those looking for evidence of fraud could themselves compromise the integrity of the process and undermine confidence in the vote. In Michigan, the efforts to access the machines jumped into public view this month when the state attorney general, Dana Nessel (D), requested a special prosecutor be assigned to look into a group that includes her likely Republican opponent, Matthew DePerno.

Full Article: Michigan plot to breach voting machines points to a national trend – The Washington Post

‘Hackers against conspiracies’: Cyber sleuths take aim at election disinformation | Maggie Miller/Politico

One of the country’s biggest hacking conferences became a test site this year for an urgent political question for the midterms: How to hunt for vulnerabilities in voting machines without fueling election misinformation. Since 2017, the annual DEF CON conference — which wrapped up Sunday in Las Vegas — has featured a “Voting Machine Village” where attendees attempt to crack voting equipment ranging from registration databases to ballot-casting machines. The hackers at DEF CON — which takes its name from the military term for alert levels — have found vulnerabilities in nearly every machine featured during those years. But this year, in the wake of a 2020 U.S. presidential election where false claims of election fraud abounded — including everything from disproven allegations that mail-in ballots were tampered with, to unfounded claims that some voting machines were programmed to change votes — the Voting Village got a lot more political — and the organizers worked to control the information coming out of it. “If there is one theme this year, it’s hackers against conspiracies,” said Harri Hursti, the co-founder of the Voting Machine Village. “2020 and all the side effects have changed everything here.” It’s a tough battle to fight, and one that offers a taste of the problems that the election security community will be grappling with in the run-up to the November elections and the weeks following — as they try to both make sure voting equipment is as secure as possible and to tamp down false claims that the equipment could be tampered with to change the outcome of the election.

Full Article: ‘Hackers against conspiracies’: Cyber sleuths take aim at election disinformation – POLITICO

National: Election deniers march toward power in key 2024 battlegrounds | Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

First came Kristina Karamo, a community college instructor from Detroit who claimed without evidence that she witnessed fraud as a 2020 election observer — and who in April became her party’s pick for secretary of state, Michigan’s top election official, after repeatedly touting those claims. Next was Doug Mastriano, the firebrand state lawmaker from Pennsylvania who urged his colleagues to throw out Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. In May, Mastriano secured the GOP nomination for governor, a position with the power to certify the state’s slate of presidential electors. Finally, this month, Arizona Republicans nominated Kari Lake for governor and Mark Finchem for secretary of state. Both are outspoken election deniers who have pledged that they would not have certified Biden’s victory in their state. The winners fit a pattern: Across the battleground states that decided the 2020 vote, candidates who deny the legitimacy of that election have claimed nearly two-thirds of GOP nominations for state and federal offices with authority over elections, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Full Article: Election deniers march toward power in key 2024 battlegrounds – The Washington Post

National: Trump-allied lawyers pursued voting machine data in multiple states, records reveal | Emma Brown , Jon Swaine , Aaron C. Davis and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

A team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported, according to emails and other records obtained by The Washington Post. As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states, according to the documents and interviews. The firm charged an upfront retainer fee for each job, which in one case was $26,000. Attorney Sidney Powell sent the team to Michigan to copy a rural county’s election data and later helped arrange for them to do the same in the Detroit area, according to the records. A Trump campaign attorney engaged the team to travel to Nevada. And the day after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol the team was in southern Georgia, copying data from a Dominion voting system in rural Coffee County. The emails and other records were collected through a subpoena issued to the forensics firm, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, by plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit in federal court over the security of Georgia’s voting systems. The documents provide the first confirmation that data from Georgia’s election system was copied. Indications of a breach there were first raised by plaintiffs in the case in February, and state officials have said they are investigating.

Full Article: Trump-allied lawyers pursued voting machine data in multiple states, records reveal – The Washington Post

National: CISA expands efforts to fight election disinformation ahead of ‘challenging’ 2024 vote | Suzanne Smalley/CyberScoop

Chris Krebs, former head of the nation’s cybersecurity agency inside the Department of Homeland Security, caused a stir this week when he suggested the agency break out on its own. Instead of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency residing in DHS, Krebs told an audience at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, a standalone CISA could help streamline how the private sector and other stakeholders work with the government to combat cyberthreats. “Instead of going to five or six different agencies, make the front door clearly visible — and as I see it that’s CISA,” Krebs said. But former CISA officials and other cybersecurity experts said that idea is simply unrealistic and impractical. CyberScoop spoke with eight former U.S. cybersecurity officials, executives and experts about Krebs’ comments and a majority said that CISA needs to reside inside DHS in order to accomplish its mission. “DHS gives CISA size and Cabinet-level seniority in the interagency,” Looking Glass CEO Bryan Ware, who previously served in senior cybersecurity roles at CISA and DHS, told CyberScoop. “I worry that without that top cover [CISA] could be diminished by DOD, FBI and others.”

Full Articlee: CISA expands efforts to fight election disinformation ahead of ‘challenging’ 2024 vote

National: On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms | Tiffany Hsu/The New York Times

In Germany, TikTok accounts impersonated prominent political figures during the country’s last national election. In Colombia, misleading TikTok posts falsely attributed a quotation from one candidate to a cartoon villain and allowed a woman to masquerade as another candidate’s daughter. In the Philippines, TikTok videos amplified sugarcoated myths about the country’s former dictator and helped his son prevail in the country’s presidential race. Now, similar problems have arrived in the United States. Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads — the platform’s enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm — can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain. Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month. Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times. Some videos urged viewers to vote in November while citing debunked rumors raised during the congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. TikTok posts have garnered thousands of views by claiming, without evidence, that predictions of a surge in Covid-19 infections this fall are an attempt to discourage in-person voting.

Full Article: On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms – The New York Times

National: Another year, another high-profile voter-fraud summit — this time from True the Vote — goes bust | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

It was just over a year ago that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell convened supporters and data experts in South Dakota for a multiday summit at which he pledged to show his evidence that foreign actors had interfered in the 2020 election. As presented, the idea was straightforward: Lindell, who believed fervently that the election had been stolen, would finally offer up the raw information that he claimed showed how voting machines had been hacked and the results altered from overseas. This wasn’t his analysis, obviously; he’d hired guys who said they’d uncovered a pattern that could be replicated by others. But when the moment came … it couldn’t. The data was invalid and/or useless. There was no proof. None has since emerged. But Lindell was in a corner. He’d kept stringing people along for months, promising a big reveal. Whether he knew he didn’t have anything or not, someone did. And this is how cons work: The stakes keep getting increased until the whole thing collapses. This episode sprang to mind immediately when I started watching “The Pit,” a symposium held in Arizona over the weekend by 2022′s in-vogue election conspiracy theorists, the leaders of the group True the Vote. Same elevation of hype. Same collapse of what was promised.

Full Article: Another year, another high-profile voter-fraud summit — this time from True the Vote — goes bust – The Washington Post

Election lies pose physical threat to US poll workers, House report warns | Victoria Bekiempis/The Guardian

A sweeping US House oversight committee report has warned that lies and misinformation around the 2020 American presidential election present an “ongoing threat to representative democracy” and pose a grave physical danger to election officials. The 21-page report called for emergency funding to address increased security costs related to 2022 contests and warned that there was a much-heightened risk that conspiracy theorists could gain power over elections in the future. The report also detailed chilling threats against election administrators across the country. One Texas official received menacing messages targeting him and “threatening his children, saying, ‘I think we should end your bloodline.’” The messages against him came following “personal attacks on national media outlets”. Another threat included a social media call to “hang him when convicted for fraud and let his lifeless body hang in public until maggots drip out of his mouth”. The committee started investigating the impact of lies surrounding election administration in early 2021. After former Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he falsely insisted that the election was stolen from him.

Full Article: Election lies pose physical threat to US poll workers, House report warns | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

Barcode Voting Machines: The Most Unnecessary Gap in US Election Security | Elise Kline/WhoWhatWhy

Election technology experts are warning that barcode ballot marking devices (BMDs) are vulnerable to bad actors capable of committing the perfect crime: changing the information on a ballot and getting away with it without the voter even realizing it happened. The use of barcodes is one of these machines’ biggest downsides. When people vote with these BMDs, they fill out their ballot on a screen; a printer then produces a paper ballot marked with a barcode. To cast their ballot, users feed this paper into a third device that scans the barcode to record the vote. And that’s a problem. “Voters can’t read barcodes,” said Alex Halderman, professor of computer science and director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan. “The problem is that you’re putting a potentially compromised computer in between the voter and the permanent and only record of their ballot.” Their susceptibility to these types of attacks is not the only problem; BMDs are also difficult to adequately test and audit, according to a 2022 research report from the University of California, Berkeley. The report demonstrates that even a small percentage of votes changed in a cybersecurity attack can alter the overall margin of results. It found that changing the votes on just 1 percent of ballots in a jurisdiction can alter the margin of a contest jurisdiction-wide by 2 percent, even if there are no undervotes or invalid votes.

Full Article: Barcode Voting Machines: The Most Unnecessary Gap in US Election Security – WhoWhatWhy

National: After Mar-a-Lago search, users on pro-Trump forums agitate for ‘civil war’ — including a Jan. 6 rioter | Ben Collins and Ryan J. Reilly/NBC

Some users on pro-Trump internet forums told users to “lock and load,” agitated for civil war and urged protesters to head to Mar-a-Lago in the hours after news broke that the FBI searched former President Donald Trump’s Florida compound on Monday. One user posting about the “civil war” shortly after the search was Tyler Welsh Slaeker, a Washington state man awaiting sentencing for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to previous research and statements posted online. A report in December by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative group, found that Slaeker posted to the pro-Trump internet forum TheDonald under the username “bananaguard62.” On Monday night, the username “bananaguard62” posted the top reply to the “lock and load” post. “Are we not in a cold civil war at this point?” the account asked. Another user responded, “several points ago.” Another top reply to Slaeker quoted a notorious antisemitic Nazi rallying cry.

Full Article: After Mar-a-Lago search, users on pro-Trump forums agitate for ‘civil war’ — including a Jan. 6 rioter

National: Historians privately warn Biden that America’s democracy is teetering | Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker and Tyler Pager/The Washington Post

President Biden paused last week, during one of the busiest stretches of his presidency, for a nearly two-hour private history lesson from a group of academics who raised alarms about the dire condition of democracy at home and abroad. The conversation during a ferocious lightning storm on Aug. 4 unfolded as a sort of Socratic dialogue between the commander in chief and a select group of scholars, who painted the current moment as among the most perilous in modern history for democratic governance, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting. Comparisons were made to the years before the 1860 election when Abraham Lincoln warned that a “house divided against itself cannot stand” and the lead-up to the 1940 election, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled rising domestic sympathy for European fascism and resistance to the United States joining World War II. The diversion was, for Biden, part of a regular effort to use outside experts, in private White House meetings, to help him work through his approach to multiple crises facing his presidency. Former president Bill Clinton spoke with Biden in May about how to navigate inflation and the midterm elections. A group of foreign policy experts, including former Republican advisers, came to the White House in January to brief Biden before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Full Article: Historians privately warn Biden: America’s democracy is on the brink – The Washington Post

National: CISA publishes cyber toolkit for election officials ahead of midterms | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday released a guide to digital threats facing state and local election officials and recommendations on how to mitigate them in the run-up to November. The “Cybersecurity Toolkit to Protect Elections” aims to help election administrators and their staffs protect themselves against threats including phishing, ransomware, email scams, denial-of-service attacks and other vectors that could potentially disrupt the voting process or confuse voters. The guide notes, for instance, that election officials “are often required to open email attachments, which could contain malicious payloads,” to run processes like absentee ballot applications. It also warns that a ransomware attack against an election office could scramble or leak voter registration data or the software used to publish unofficial election results. The cyber toolkit is the latest output from CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, or JCDC — the year-old initiative borrows its name from the band AC/DC — and comes as CISA Director Jen Easterly and many election officials gather in Las Vegas for the Black Hat and DEF CON events. Easterly launched the JCDC effort in 2021 to build engagement between federal cyber authorities, the tech industry and state and local governments.

Full Article: CISA publishes cyber toolkit for election officials ahead of midterms

National: At least 10 Republican nominees for state elections chief have disputed the legitimacy of the 2020 election | Daniel Dale/CNN

In at least 10 states, the Republican nominee for the job of overseeing future elections is someone who has questioned, rejected or tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Secretaries of state will play a critical role in managing and certifying the presidential election in 2024. The distinct possibility that some of these secretaries will be people with a history of election denial is a major challenge for American democracy — especially because former President Donald Trump, who is widely expected to run again in 2024, continues to pressure state officials to discard the will of voters. The Republican nominees for secretary of state in the November 2022 midterm elections include three swing-state candidates who have made efforts to overturn 2020 results in their states: Mark Finchem of Arizona, Kristina Karamo of Michigan and Jim Marchant of Nevada. The Republican nominee in Republican-dominated Alabama, Wes Allen, expressed support for a 2020 lawsuit that sought to get the Supreme Court to toss out Joe Biden’s victory. The Republican nominee in Republican-dominated Indiana, Diego Morales, has called the 2020 election a “scam,” the vote “tainted” and the outcome “questionable.”

Full Article: At least 10 Republican nominees for state elections chief have disputed the legitimacy of the 2020 election – CNNPolitics

National: Five States Will Decide If the 2024 Election Can Be Stolen | Ryan Teague Beckwith and Bill Allison/Bloomberg

Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden failed, but his loyalists have never stopped trying to turn the US election system into one that would return him to the White House in 2024—fairly or otherwise. In the last two years, Republicans have sought to remove state officials who wouldn’t manufacture votes and falsely declare him the winner. They changed the way elections are run in response to his conspiracy theories. Most importantly, they’ve nominated people who insist Trump won as candidates for US Congress and governor, and for offices that certify the outcome. Has it worked? To answer that question, a team of Bloomberg journalists set out to find which states are most vulnerable to political election interference—and what it means for elections this fall and in 2024, when the White House will once again be at stake. We dug into laws in all 50 states and scrutinized the thousands of election-related bills proposed nationwide since 2020. We consulted election-security experts, voting rights advocates, election lawyers, academics and current and former elections administrators as well as decades of political research to zero in on how elections work.

Full Article: Five States Will Decide If the 2024 Election Can Be Stolen

National: Hunting for Voter Fraud, Conspiracy Theorists Organize ‘Stakeouts’ | Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times