National

This weekend, Australians will vote in the country’s federal elections. The process will likely be seamless, transparent, and punctuated by countless civic-minded barbecues affectionately known as sausage sizzles. This is how elections generally go in Australia, but for those in New South Wales, that wasn’t the case late last year. The state had encouraged a significant number of voters to move to an internet-voting system called iVote. In December, it melted down so badly that the New South Wales Electoral Commission not only discontinued its use but also asked a court to nullify the results of three city-council elections. It was an embarrassing failure for e-voting. More than 650,000 online votes were cast—probably a world record, says Vanessa Teague, an election-security expert and a professor at the Australian National University. Teague has been warning governments about vulnerabilities in e-voting for years, as have cybersecurity researchers in the U.S., where systems like iVote are being expanded in at least nine states. Letting people vote from home with the click of a button is an appealing idea, especially in the U.S., where turnout is abysmal. The problem, the American Association for the Advancement of Science says, is that there’s no “evidence that any internet voting technology is safe or can be made so in the foreseeable future … All research to date demonstrates the opposite.”

Full Article: American Democracy Isn’t Ready for Online Voting – The Atlantic

National: A PDF File Is Not Paper, So PDF Ballots Cannot Be Verified | Andrew Appel/Freedom to Tinker

A new paper by Henry Herrington, a computer science undergraduate at Princeton University, demonstrates that a hacked PDF ballot can display one set of votes to the voter, but different votes after it’s emailed – or uploaded – to election officials doing the counting. For overseas voters or voters with disabilities, many states provide “Remote Accessible Vote By Mail,” or RAVBM, a system that allows voters the ability to download and print an absentee ballot, fill it out by hand on paper, and physically mail it back. Some states use commercial products, while others have developed their own solutions. In general, this form of RAVBM can be made adequately secure, mainly because the voters make their own marks on the paper. In some forms of RAVBM, the voter can fill out the ballot using an app on their computer before printing and mailing it. This is less secure: if malware on the voter’s computer has “hacked” the voting app, what’s printed out may differ from what the voter indicated on the screen, and voters are not very good at reviewing the printouts and noticing such changes. The most dangerous form of RAVBM is one that allows electronic ballot return, in which the voter uploads or emails a PDF file. Thirty states allow overseas voters to do electronic ballot return, either by email, fax, or web-portal upload, as shown in Table 5 (pages 34-35) of Herrington’s longer paper, Ballot Acrobatics: Altering Electronic Ballots using Internal PDF Scripting.

Full Article: A PDF File Is Not Paper, So PDF Ballots Cannot Be Verified

National: Security chiefs scramble to prevent Russian interference in midterms | Tom Rees/The Telegraph

US security chiefs are scrambling to prevent Russian interference in the midterm elections as they are “very concerned” about the Kremlin using cyber warfare and online disinformation. Jen Easterly, US director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the US has been forced to beef up its election cybersecurity after the Kremlin was accused of influencing the 2016 vote to help Donald Trump win. Joe Biden and the Democrats are heading into a difficult midterms and a recent Ipsos MORI poll found that more than half of Americans are concerned about Russia spreading misinformation online in this year’s election. Ms Easterly said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that US officials are “very concerned” but have “raised the bar” on election infrastructure cybersecurity. “I’m projecting myself into November because obviously we are very concerned about foreign [influence],” Ms Easterly said. “I frankly, don’t think that Russia needs to do anything to create chaos in our elections.” Ms Easterly said she is “much more concerned about physical threats to election officials and disinformation threats to the American people’s confidence.”

Full Article: US security chiefs scramble to prevent Russian interference in midterms

National: How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures | Nick Corasaniti, Karen Yourish and Keith Collins/The New York Times

At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of legislative votes, records and official statements by The New York Times. The tally accounts for 44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided. In each of those states, the election was conducted without any evidence of widespread fraud, leaving election officials from both parties in agreement on the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr. The Times’s analysis exposes how deeply rooted lies and misinformation about former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat have become in state legislatures, which play an integral role in U.S. democracy. In some, the false view that the election was stolen — either by fraud or as a result of pandemic-related changes to the process — is now widely accepted as fact among Republican lawmakers, turning statehouses into hotbeds of conspiratorial thinking and specious legal theories.

Full Article: How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures – The New York Times

National: This nonprofit will use big data to fight voter suppression in the midterm elections | Adele Peters/Fast Company

After the presidential election in 2020, when Georgia launched runoff elections for the state’s two Senate seats, officials in Cobb County on the outskirts of Atlanta announced that they were going to shut down several early voting sites in diverse neighborhoods. But a recently launched nonprofit stepped in, using anonymized cell phone data to show the impact that the change would have on voters. “We were able to use the data we had already collected to show how shutting down those specific polling locations would disproportionately impact voters of color,” says Daniel Wein, cofounder and head of partnerships at the nonprofit, called the Center for New Data. “And in two days, that information was published and was circulated in the community. Stacey Abrams tweeted about it. And Cobb County reversed several of the poll closures.” The nonprofit, part of the current cohort at the impact tech accelerator Fast Forward, makes use of the type of data typically used by advertisers—location data from smartphones—to understand how long voters have to wait in line; in 2020, the nonprofit said it would receive voter wait time data from the November 3 election, collected by location-data mining companies X-Mode Social and Veraset, as soon as November 4. The methodology for using this data to analyze disparities at polling places came from a study, published in 2019, that analyzed anonymous location data from 10 million smartphones at 93,000 polling places to create a detailed picture of wait times. In Black neighborhoods, voters waited 29% longer to vote than those in white neighborhoods, per that study. They were also 74% more likely to end up waiting more than half an hour.

Full Article: This nonprofit will use big data to fight voter suppression in the 202

Editorial: America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert Reich/The Guardian

Decades ago, America’s monied interests bankrolled a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism and constitutional democracy. Today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America – backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting and even questioning the value of democracy. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15m to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” Thiel has donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore. The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions. Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, which includes Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

Full Article: America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert Reich | The Guardian

Misinformation, violence and a paper shortage threaten midterm elections, officials say | Jacob Fischler/Idaho Capital Sun

Members of a U.S. Senate panel and election administrators raised a bevy of concerns Thursday about the challenges elections officials will face this fall, saying problems ranging from a lack of paper to coordinated misinformation campaigns could affect confidence in U.S. democracy. A bipartisan panel of current and former elections officials and experts told the Senate Rules and Administration Committee that state officials face threats of physical violence, while dealing with misinformation, supply chain challenges and funding shortfalls — making the administration of this year’s midterm elections more difficult. Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, listed those developments at the start of the hearing. She highlighted threats that have led Colorado officials to receive active shooter training and obtain bullet-proof vests, with morale among elections administrators nationwide worryingly low. “In light of these challenges, we must support the election officials working on the front lines of our democracy,” Klobuchar said. In addition to relatively new concerns related to holding elections in a pandemic, ranking Republican Roy Blunt of Missouri noted foreign and domestic adversaries persist in targeting election infrastructure and spreading online misinformation.

Full Article: Misinformation, violence and a paper shortage threaten midterm elections, officials say – Idaho Capital Sun

Effort to recruit poll workers relaunches amid fears of shortage | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Power the Polls, an effort backed by major civic groups and businesses that recruited hundreds of thousands of people to serve as poll workers in 2020, is relaunching its efforts ahead of the midterms. The program relaunch, shared first with POLITICO, comes amid some early signs that some jurisdictions are struggling to recruit enough poll workers to staff primaries and the general election. “We’re seeing already in the early primaries that there have been places that polling locations have been closed due to poll worker shortages, or there’s been the threat of closing polling locations,” said Jane Slusser, the effort’s program manager, in an interview. Recruiting poll workers was one of the biggest challenges for election officials during the 2020 election. And a rise in conspiracy theory-fueled threats to election workers, from secretaries of state on down, have worried some in the field, who say the environment makes it more difficult to recruit and retain enough workers this election cycle. Slusser said Power the Polls would look to reengage the 700,000 people who signed up to be potential poll workers in 2020, encouraging them to get in touch with their local election offices to work again. She said Power the Polls would place a particular emphasis on recruiting workers who have specialized skill sets, like knowing multiple languages, that local officials need to run elections smoothly.

Full Article: Effort to recruit poll workers relaunches amid fears of shortage – POLITICO

National: Midterm Stakes Grow Clearer: Election Deniers Will Be on Many Ballots | Reid J. Epstein/The New York Times

Republican voters in this week’s primary races demonstrated a willingness to nominate candidates who parrot Donald J. Trump’s election lies and who appear intent on exerting extraordinary political control over voting systems. The results make clear that the November midterms may well affect the fate of free and fair elections in the country. In Pennsylvania, Republican voters united behind a nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, who helped lead the brazen effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election and chartered buses to the rally before the Capitol riot, and who has since promoted a constitutionally impossible effort to decertify President Biden’s victory in his state. In North Carolina, voters chose a G.O.P. Senate nominee, Representative Ted Budd, who voted in Congress against certifying the 2020 results and who continues to refuse to say that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected. And in Idaho, which Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in 2020, 57 percent of voters backed two Republican candidates for secretary of state who pushed election falsehoods, though they lost a three-way race to a rival who accepts Mr. Biden as president. The strong showings on Tuesday by election deniers, who have counterparts running competitively in primaries across the country over the coming months, were an early signal of the threat posed by the Trump-inspired movement. “It’s a big problem,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican, who added that the G.O.P. needs “to show an alternative vision for the party. I don’t think we’re seeing enough of that right now.”

Full Article: Midterm Stakes Grow Clearer: Election Deniers Will Be on Many Ballots – The New York Times

National: Election Officials Steel Themselves for Threats as Midterm Season Gears Up | Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

Forrest Lehman, the elections director in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming County, was brought up short earlier this year by a poll worker’s question: What should I do if I get a death threat? “I never would have had a question like that before 2020,” said Mr. Lehman, expressing relief that he knew of no such threats in his largely rural county. “I don’t expect that to happen,” he added, “but it’s illustrative that it’s on their mind now.” Long accustomed to working out of the spotlight, a number of election administrators say threats and harassment have become a constant undertone to their work since the contentious aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, when then-President Donald Trump, a Republican, and his allies began spreading unsupported claims of widespread fraud after his defeat. Offices in some jurisdictions have implemented new security measures as they prepare for the 2022 midterms, the biggest test of the country’s voting system since then and a crucial proving ground for what could be sharp challenges surrounding the 2024 presidential vote. Primary contests are already in full swing, including high-profile races in Pennsylvania and North Carolina on Tuesday.

Full Article: Election Officials Steel Themselves for Threats as Midterm Season Gears Up – WSJ

National: A pro-Trump film suggests its data are so accurate, it solved a murder. That’s false | Tom Dreisbach/ NPR

A conservative “election integrity” group called True The Vote has made multiple misleading or false claims about its work, NPR has found, including the suggestion that they helped solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Atlanta. The claims appear in a new pro-Trump film called “2,000 Mules,” which purports to have “smoking gun” evidence of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election in the form of digital device location tracking data. Former president Donald Trump has embraced the film, which has gained popularity on the political right, along with the claim about the murder case. Trump’s official spokesperson, Liz Harrington, said True The Vote “solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta. I mean, they are heroes.” Fans of the film have echoed that message on social media. That claim is false. Authorities in Georgia arrested and secured indictments against two suspects in the murder of Secoriea Turner in August 2021. In response to NPR’s inquiries, True The Vote acknowledged it had contacted law enforcement more than two months later, meaning it played no role in those arrests or indictments. It’s not the only false or misleading claim that True The Vote and Dinesh D’Souza, the director behind “2,000 Mules,” have made, NPR found. Fact-checkers from the Associated Press and PolitiFact have examined the central voter fraud allegations in “2,000 Mules” and found that the film makes many dubious claims. A Washington Post analysis summarized the film’s allegations as a leap of faith – “we’re just asked to trust that True the Vote found what it says it found.”

Full Article: Dinesh D’Souza film ‘2000 Mules’ Falsely Implies Data Solved A Murder : NPR

National: In key battlegrounds, races for secretary of state take on new weight | Simon Montlake/CSMonitor

Most voters can’t name the secretary of state where they live. Traditionally a low-profile office, it doesn’t often merit much in the way of media coverage or fundraising when on the ballot, as it is in 27 states this fall. In Georgia, however, GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has become a household name. His now-famous refusal to “find” 11,780 more votes for former President Donald Trump – and his insistence on the accuracy of the 2020 results in his state – made him both a hero to Democrats and a villain to many Trump supporters. “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” President Trump told Mr. Raffensperger in a recorded phone call that was later made public, after he’d recertified Joe Biden’s victory. Now Mr. Raffensperger is facing a tough four-way GOP primary on May 24, in a contest that will test Republican voters’ concerns about “election integrity” and the salience of Mr. Trump’s disproven claims of widespread fraud. Whoever wins the primary, which polls suggest could go to a runoff, will face a Democratic opponent in November’s midterms. Candidates hewing to Mr. Trump’s “election fraud” narrative are running for secretary of state in 17 of the 27 states where the office will be on the ballot in the fall, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group, the States United Democracy Center. And Trump-endorsed candidates are running in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona, all states where Mr. Trump contested the 2020 results.

Full Article: In key battlegrounds, races for secretary of state take on new weight – CSMonitor.com

National: Klobuchar, Warren introduce bill to provide $20 billion for election administration | The Hill

Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Wednesday introduced a bill to provide $20 billion in federal funding to help states and localities to administer elections, train poll workers and eliminate barriers to voting. The legislation, which is co-sponsored by nine other Senate Democrats, would secure election infrastructure by upgrading voting equipment and registration systems, help recruit and train nonpartisan election officials and poll workers, protect election officials from threats and increase ballot access for minorities, voters with disabilities and those who live overseas or on Indian lands. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, but in recent years we have seen a barrage of threats seeking to undermine our elections,” said Klobuchar. “It is critical that we respond to these threats head-on by ensuring that state and local governments have the resources needed to strengthen the administration of our elections, protect election officials on the frontlines, and provide all eligible voters with the opportunity to make their voices heard,” she said. Klobuchar called on the Biden administration to prioritize election security funding in his 2023 budget proposal, something the administration later did.

Full Article: Klobuchar, Warren introduce bill to provide $20 billion for election administration | The Hill

Election officials in Arizona, other battleground states, stand up against restrictive voting laws | KiraLerner/AZ Mirror

When Georgia legislators pushed through a restrictive voting bill during the 2021 session, Bartow County election supervisor Joseph Kirk said he felt frustrated and sidelined. Lawmakers largely didn’t take election officials’ views into account, he said, and what resulted was a law that included a number of provisions that he said election officials believe are “to the detriment of voters.”So when Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature tried to pass another voting bill in the session this year that included provisions he didn’t agree with, Kirk made sure to speak out. “Whatever I could do, I did do,” said Kirk, who serves as the treasurer of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials. Across the country, election officials this legislative season made their voices heard in hearings and through appeals to lawmakers, urging them not to enact voting laws that they saw as unfeasible or unnecessary, or that would ultimately make their jobs more difficult. In crucial battleground states including Arizona, Georgia, and Florida, they succeeded in defeating legislation that would have hurt voting access or the integrity of elections. In Georgia, Kirk disagreed with a portion of the 2022 bill that would have changed chain-of-custody requirements for ballots and would have required what he saw as unnecessary security precautions, so he spoke to his lawmakers and in front of committees and sent in written statements.

Full Article: Election officials in Arizona, other battleground states, stand up against restrictive voting laws

Paper Ballots Helped Secure the 2020 Election — What Will 2022 Look Like? | Derek Tisler and urquoise Baker/Brennan Center for Justice

Even with unprecedented challenges and historic turnout in 2020, election officials across the country administered an election that the federal government’s cybersecurity agency called the “most secure in American history.” Many factors led to this result, from close coordination and preparation between federal, state, and local agencies, to the expansion of voting options that reduced stress on election systems. But one of the most significant was the rapid transition in recent years to voting on paper ballots, a trend that is set to continue into the 2022 and 2024 elections. Experts widely recognize paper ballots as one of the most important security measures that states can adopt. When selections are recorded on paper, voters can easily verify that their ballot accurately reflects their choices. Paper ballots also facilitate post-election audits, where election workers can check the paper records against electronic vote totals to confirm that voting machines are working as intended. For example, by replacing paperless voting machines before the 2020 election, Georgia was able to conduct a hand-count of every ballot cast, confirming the presidential election outcome and dispelling conspiracy theories about the state’s voting machines. This would not have been possible in Georgia as recently as 2018.

Full Article: Paper Ballots Helped Secure the 2020 Election — What Will 2022 Look Like? | Brennan Center for Justice

National: U.S. groups urge social media companies to fight ‘Big Lie,” election disinformation | Reuters

Social media companies including Facebook (FB.O), Twitter , YouTube and TikTok must act now to blunt the effect of false information – including Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that his 2020 defeat was the result of fraud – in this year’s U.S. midterm congressional elections, rights groups said on Thursday. Social media platforms backed away from policies designed to fight election disinformation after the 2020 presidential race won by Democratic President Joe Biden, more than 100 advocacy groups, led by Common Cause, said in a letter to social media executives. A surge of disinformation then led to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Trump and that disinformation continues to multiply, they said, citing research and public reporting. “High-profile disinformation spreaders and other bad actors are continuing to use social media platforms to disseminate messages that undermine trust in elections,” read a letter sent to chief executives and signed by more than 100 groups lead by Common Cause.

Full Article: U.S. groups urge social media companies to fight ‘Big Lie,” election disinformation | Reuters

National: Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenas 5 Republicans, Including McCarthy | Luke Broadwater and Emily Cochrane/The New York Times

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, a significant escalation as it digs deeper into the role Republicans played in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The panel’s move was an extraordinary step in the annals of congressional investigations — a committee targeting sitting lawmakers, including a top party leader, who have refused to cooperate in a major inquiry into the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries. It reflected the belief among investigators that a group of Republican members of Congress loyal to former President Donald J. Trump had played crucial roles in the events that led to the assault on their own institution, and may have hidden what they know about Mr. Trump’s intentions and actions before, during and after the attack. Mr. McCarthy, the Californian who is in line to be speaker if his party wins the House majority in November, had a heated phone call with Mr. Trump during the riot, in which he implored the president to call off the mob invading the Capitol in his name. When Mr. Trump declined, according to Representative Jaime Herrera Buetler, a Washington Republican who has said Mr. McCarthy recounted the exchange to her, Mr. Trump sided with the rioters, saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

Full Article: Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenas 5 Republicans, Including McCarthy – The New York Times

States struggle to add paper trails to voting machines | Eric Geller/Politico

In a midterm election season where many Republicans are running for Congress on the false premise that the last presidential election was stolen, voters in eight states still vote on machines that don’t keep a hack-proof record of who they voted for — and progress on replacing those machines has been slow. After the extremely close 2000 election, which showed the pitfalls of relying on paper punchcard ballots, many jurisdictions turned to paperless electronic voting machines. But cybersecurity experts objected, warning that paperless machines undermined election security by making it impossible to reliably audit the results. Russia’s interference in the 2016 election galvanized a move back to paper records, albeit with new electronic machines that print out ballots. Since then, seven states have replaced paperless machines with devices that security experts consider safer.

Full Article: States struggle to add paper trails to voting machines

National: Evidence mounts of GOP involvement in Trump election schemes | Farnoush Amiri/Associated Press

Rioters who smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House. Hours before, Rep. Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing. Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on Jan. 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly demanding — that Vice President Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role presiding over the electoral count, somehow assert the authority to reject electors from Biden-won states. Pence “should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all,” Jordan wrote. “I have pushed for this,” Meadows replied. “Not sure it is going to happen.” The text exchange, in an April 22 court filing from the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6 riot, is in a batch of startling evidence that shows the deep involvement of some House Republicans in Trump’s desperate attempt to stay in power. A review of the evidence finds new details about how, long before the attack on the Capitol unfolded, several GOP lawmakers were participating directly in Trump’s campaign to reverse the results of a free and fair election.

Full Article: Evidence mounts of GOP involvement in Trump election schemes | AP News

National: Republican election-deniers elevate races for secretary of state | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Add one more group of contests to the white-hot races for Congress and governor that will dominate this year’s midterm elections: secretaries of state. Former President Donald Trump’s attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election and his subsequent endorsements of candidates for state election offices who are sympathetic to his view have elevated those races to top-tier status. At stake, say Democrats and others concerned about fair elections, is nothing less than American democracy. “If they win the general election, we’ve got real problems on our hands,” said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who has pushed back against the false claims made by Trump and his allies about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. “This is an effort to replace the people who oversee these races – to change the rules to make the results come out the way they want them to.” The primary season begins in force in the coming week with elections in Ohio and Indiana. Ohio voters will decide which candidate will emerge from the Republican primary for secretary of state, with the winner favored to eventually win the office in the GOP-dominated state.

Full Article: Republican election-deniers elevate races for secretary of state

National: DHS watchdog says Trump’s agency appears to have altered report on Russian interference in 2020 election in part because of politics | Priscilla Alvarez and Zachary Cohen/CNN

Full Article: DHS watchdog says Trump’s agency appears to have altered report on Russian interference in 2020 election in part because of politics – CNNPolitics

Former President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security delayed and altered an intelligence report related to Russian interference in the 2020 election, making changes that “appear to be based in part on political considerations,” according to a newly released watchdog report. The April 26 Homeland Security inspector general’s assessment provides a damning look at the way DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis dealt with intelligence related to Russia’s efforts to interfere in the US, stating the department had deviated from its standard procedures in modifying assessments related to Moscow’s targeting of the 2020 presidential election. The conclusion that Trump’s appointee appeared to have tried to downplay Russian meddling in a key intelligence report is the latest example of how his aides managed his aversion to any information about how Russia might be helping his election prospects. According to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Trump officials tried to avoid the topic during meetings and at hearings, because he would become enraged and upset when Russian meddling came up. The US intelligence community announced during the 2020 campaign that Russia was actively meddling in the election to weaken then-candidate Joe Biden. At the time, Trump downplayed those findings and promoted false claims about Biden that aligned with Russia’s disinformation efforts. The IG report addresses past suspicions that Trump appointees distorted some intelligence reports to foster a more Trump-friendly narrative.

National: NSA, Cyber Command tap new election security leaders | Martin Matishak/The Record

U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency have named the newest leaders of a joint election security task force that will play a central role in keeping the 2022 midterm elections free of foreign interference. The task force, originally dubbed the Russia Small Group, was established in 2018 by Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, who helms both Cyber Command and the NSA, to protect the 2018 midterms from meddling by Moscow. It was rechristened the Election Security Group (ESG) ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and its mandate was tweaked to include threats from countries including China, North Korea, and Iran, as well as non-state actors. “The band is already back together,” Nakasone said Wednesday at Vanderbilt University’s Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, noting the group’s scope had been changed because “we have broader issues than just one nation.” “We’re less than 200 days before our nation goes to vote for our midterm elections,” Nakasone added. “And I assure you that we are ready, we will be ready, going forward.”

Full Article: NSA, Cyber Command tap new election security leaders – The Record by Recorded Future

National: Democrats urge Biden to use presidential powers, ‘whatever means necessary’ to protect voters | Deborah Barfield Berry USA Today

With federal voting rights legislation stalled in Congress, Democratic lawmakers and civil rights activists are calling on the Biden administration to issue a new executive order aimed at better protecting voters against restrictive state election laws. Democrats and activists are increasingly disappointed with the lack of progress on passing sweeping voter protection legislation. And with high-stakes midterms elections looming, there’s also growing concern about ballot access for voters of color — historically a key voting bloc for Democrats. Rep. Joyce Beatty, , an Ohio Democrat and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the Biden administration should “do whatever is necessary, whether that’s an executive order, whether that is us figuring out a legislative approach that we can get through.” White House officials said they haven’t ruled out any avenues. “Everything’s on the table,’’ Cedric Richmond, senior advisor to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement told USA TODAY. He added: “Where there’s constitutional things we can do you can look for us to do them.”

Full Article: Voting rights: Biden urged to consider executive order to protect voters

Trump allies breach U.S. voting systems in search of ‘evidence’ | Alexander Ulmer and Nathan Layne/Reuters

Eighteen months after Donald Trump lost the White House, loyal supporters continue to falsely assert that compromised balloting machines across America robbed him of the 2020 election. To stand up that bogus claim, some Trump die-hards are taking the law into their own hands – by attempting, with some success, to compromise the voting systems themselves. Previously unreported surveillance video captured one such effort in August in the rural Colorado town of Kiowa. Footage obtained by Reuters through a public-records request shows Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder, the county’s top election official, fiddling with cables and typing on his phone as he copied computer drives containing sensitive voting information. Schroeder, a Republican, later testified that he was receiving instructions on how to copy the system’s data from a retired Air Force colonel and political activist bent on proving Trump lost because of fraud. That day, Aug. 26, Schroeder made a “forensic image of everything on the election server,” according to his testimony, and later gave the cloned hard drives to two lawyers. Schroeder is now under investigation for possible violation of election laws by the Colorado secretary of state, which has also sued him seeking the return of the data. Schroeder is defying that state demand and has refused to identify one of the lawyers who took possession of the hard drives. The other is a private attorney who works with an activist backed by Mike Lindell, the pillow mogul and election conspiracy theorist.

Full Article: Trump allies breach U.S. voting systems in search of ‘evidence’

National: Talk of martial law, Insurrection Act draws notice of Jan. 6 committee | Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

Three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She told him that some Republican members of Congress believed the only path for President Donald Trump to change the outcome of the 2020 election and stay in power was for him to declare martial law. The text from Greene (R-Ga.), revealed this week, brought to the fore the chorus of Republicans who were publicly and privately advocating for Trump to try to use the military and defense apparatus of the U.S. government to strong-arm his way past an electoral defeat. Now, discussions involving the Trump White House about using emergency powers have become an important — but little-known — part of the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation of the 2021 attack on the Capitol. In subpoenas, document requests and court filings, the panel has demanded information about any Trump administration plans to use presidential emergency powers to invoke martial law or take other steps to overturn the 2020 election. Interviews with committee members and a review of the panel’s information requests reveals a focus on emergency powers that were being considered by Trump and his allies in several categories: invoking the Insurrection Act, declaring martial law, using presidential powers to justify seizing assets of voting-machine companies, and using the military to require a rerun of the election. “Trump’s invocation of these emergency powers would have been unprecedented in all of American history,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge.

Full Article: Talk of martial law, Insurrection Act draws notice of Jan. 6 committee – The Washington Post

National: Trump’s lies helped prompt one critical election reform | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Indiana are all belatedly making moves to require paper records for all votes cast in their states — a vital shift to ensure votes weren’t manipulated by hackers or altered by digital glitches. But there’s a catch. The moves were spurred in large part by former president Donald Trump’s false claims about fraud and manipulation in the 2020 election and his baseless crusade against voting machine companies — rather than by legitimate concerns spurred by Russian interference in the 2016 contest. It may be the only security-enhancing effect of Trump’s wild and baseless claims that his election loss was illegitimate — and election security advocates are celebrating it even as they’re dubious about the impetus. “I don’t condone bizarre claims about past elections or fearmongering about how we operate elections, but if people have to resort to misguided beliefs to come to true beliefs, things could be worse,” Mark Lindeman, director of the group Verified Voting, told me. “It’s really valuable to have paper ballots, and we don’t care how people come to that conclusion,” Lindeman said.

Full Article: Trump’s lies helped prompt one critical election reform – The Washington Post

National: GAO: EAC Can Decide on State Funding for Election Officials’ Security | Lisbeth Perez/MeriTalk

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has been given full discretion to decide if states can allocate funds from the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) to provide security services for state or local election officials, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In December 2021, the EAC reached out to GAO to determine whether states may use certain grant funds made available to them under HAVA to provide “physical security services and social media threat monitoring” in connection with election activities. HAVA authorizes the use of grant funds for states to improve the administration of elections for Federal office. However, the law does not explicitly authorize nor prohibit the use of funds for security services. GAO stated in its decision that “if not otherwise specified in the law, an expense is authorized where it bears a reasonable, logical relationship to the purpose of the appropriation to be charged.” “Here, a decision to allow the use of grant funds for the physical security services and social media threat monitoring would be within EAC’s legitimate range of discretion,” the report says. “Congress vested in EAC the authority to administer the HAVA grants [but] also vested in EAC the authority to determine whether a particular grant expenditure helps ‘improv[e] the administration of elections for Federal office.’”

Full Article: GAO: EAC Can Decide on State Funding for Election Officials’ Security – MeriTalk

National: Digital Response launches new election program | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

The U.S. Digital Response, the nonprofit civic-tech group that sprung up during the COVID-19 pandemic to assist local governments with online service delivery, is adding a new program focused on developing tools to help election officials. The effort will see the organization’s engineers and managers work with county- and local-level election administrators on using open-source technologies to build products like poll-location search tools, election information websites and applications that help officials manage poll workers. “What we specialize in is simple tools that make an impact that are quick,” Priya Garg, one of the heads of the organization’s new elections program, told StateScoop. U.S. Digital Response has offered its assistance to election administrators since its founding in 2020, when it developed poll-locator tools for tribal voters in Arizona and built an app for Harris County, Texas, to recruit and organize poll workers in the country’s third-biggest voting jurisdiction. The beefed-up elections program is the product of a major grant USDR recently received from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit group of election-minded technologists that received $350 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, in 2020. U.S. Digital Response leaders declined to disclose the value of the grant, only saying that it was a “multi-million-dollar” award capable of sustaining the group’s work for several years.

Full Article: U.S. Digital Response launches new election program

National: Cyber agency director says election security a top priority ahead of midterms | The Hill