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.
National: A Hidden New Threat to U.S. Elections | Blake Hounshell and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times
It’s been more than nine weeks since the Pennsylvania primary. The election is still not certified. The reason: Three counties — Berks, Fayette and Lancaster — are refusing to process absentee ballots that were received in a timely manner and are otherwise valid, except the voter did not write a date on the declaration printed on the ballot’s return envelope. The Pennsylvania attorney general has argued in court amid a lawsuit against those three counties that the state will not certify results unless they “include every ballot lawfully cast in that election” (emphasis theirs). The standoff in Pennsylvania is the latest attempt by conservative-leaning counties to disrupt, delay or otherwise meddle with the process of statewide election certification, a normally ceremonial administrative procedure that became a target of Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 contest. It’s happened in other states, too. Earlier this year, Otero County, a rural conservative area in southern New Mexico, refused to certify its primary election, citing conspiracy theories about voting machines, though no county commissioner produced evidence to legitimize their concerns. Eventually, under threat of legal action from the state’s attorney general and an order from the State Supreme Court, the commissioners relented and certified the county’s roughly 7,300 votes. Pro-democracy groups saw Otero County’s refusal to certify the results as a warning of potentially grave future crises, and expressed worries about how a state might be able to certify a presidential election under similar circumstances.
Full Article: A Hidden New Threat to U.S. Elections – The New York Times