National

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents. The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present. They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position. Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature. By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory. Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.

Full Article: Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House | Vladimir Putin | The Guardian

National: Lawmakers Pitch New Voting System for US Troops Stationed Overseas | Patricia Kime/Military.com

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is seeking to increase the number of U.S. service members who exercise their right to vote — especially those stationed in combat zones or deployed overseas. Sens. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced a bill Tuesday that would establish a secure electronic voting system for those assigned to hazardous duty stations or on a rotational deployment. According to the senators, the fully auditable system would track votes from the time they are marked through the counting process. In a release, Duckworth said a new system is needed as part of an overall effort to “strengthen voting rights across the country.” “Service members face numerous barriers to voting that make it more difficult for them to participate in our democracy by exercising their right to vote,” she said. “[The bill] would increase access to the ballot box for troops.”

Full Article: Lawmakers Pitch New Voting System for US Troops Stationed Overseas | Military.com

National: Top generals mobilized on fears Trump wanted military post-election coup, book details | Rebecca Shabad/NBC

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, worried that then-President Donald Trump would try to use the military to attempt a coup after the 2020 election and vowed to prevent it. That’s according to a new book by Washington Post reporters Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” which will be released next week. The book, excerpts of which were obtained by NBC News, attributes the accounts of private conversations between military and government officials to myriad unnamed sources, including aides to those involved. Trump issued a statement Thursday denying that he had ever considered a coup and criticizing Milley, whom he said he appointed only because people he disliked had in turn disliked the general. “So ridiculous! Sorry to inform you, but an Election is my form of ‘coup,’ and if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley,” Trump said.

Full Article: Top generals mobilized on fears Trump wanted military post-election coup, book details

National: Phony Audits = Real Threats to the Vote | Michael Waldman/Brennan Center for Justice

For two months, Republicans, conspiracy theorists, and “Stop the Steal” activists have been conducting an “audit” of Arizona’s presidential election results. Critics call it the “fraudit.” It devolved into a national joke as fevered partisans looked for evidence of bamboo fibers to prove that China had printed the ballots to give the state to Joe Biden. The spectacle is reportedly backfiring, as Arizona’s independent voters recoil. But it’s no joke. It shows how deeply Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen has seeped into American politics. And now similar partisan election reviews are beginning to spread across the country. In Pennsylvania last week, a state senator asked three counties, including Philadelphia, for access to election equipment and materials. The legislator, a leader in the state’s “Stop the Steal” movement, said he’s copying the method of election deniers in Maricopa County, Arizona, where this nonsense began. In response, Philadelphia’s Republican City Commissioner Al Schmidt, who is responsible for the city’s elections, retorted: “I would encourage our legislators to educate themselves to know that our election was certified and that it was audited, not once — but twice — and there was no doubt about the outcome. It was safe, it was secure, and it wasn’t even close.” In other words: Trump lost, Biden won. These sham “audits,” however, are anything but objective and secure. In a joint report with R Street Institute and Protect Democracy, we examined proposed and ongoing reviews of election results in five states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Full Article: Phony Audits = Real Threats to the Vote | Brennan Center for Justice

National: As Republicans Take Aim at Voting, Democrats Search for a Response | Michael Wines/The New York Times

The Democratic Party pledged millions for it last week, grass-roots groups are campaigning for it nationwide and, as recently as Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said the fight for it had only begun. But behind the brave words are rising concerns among voting-rights advocates and Democrats that the counterattack against the aggressive push by Republicans to restrict ballot access is faltering, and at a potentially pivotal moment. President Biden is expected to put his political muscle behind the issue in a speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday. But in Congress, Democratic senators have been unable to move voting and election bills that would address what many of them call a fundamental attack on American democracy that could lock in a new era of Republican minority rule. And in the courts, attacks on voting restrictions face an increasingly hostile judiciary and narrowing legal options. Texas seems poised, absent another walkout by Democratic legislators, to become the latest Republican-controlled state to pass a sweeping legislative agenda placing new barriers to the ability to cast a ballot. That comes on the heels of a major Supreme Court ruling this month further weakening the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court nullified its major provision in 2012. The decision arrived as advocacy groups were pressing lawsuits against restrictive voting laws enacted in roughly a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Full Article: As Republicans Take Aim at Voting, Democrats Search for a Response – The New York Times

National: The Biggest Threat to Democracy Is the GOP Stealing the Next Election | Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt/The Atlantic

The greatest threat to American democracy today is not a repeat of January 6, but the possibility of a stolen presidential election. Contemporary democracies that die meet their end at the ballot box, through measures that are nominally constitutional. The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will “legally” overturn an election. In 2018, when we wrote How Democracies Die, we knew that Donald Trump was an authoritarian figure, and we held the Republican Party responsible for abdicating its role as democratic gatekeeper. But we did not consider the GOP to be an antidemocratic party. Four years later, however, the bulk of the Republican Party is behaving in an antidemocratic manner. Solving this problem requires that we address both the acute crisis and the underlying long-term conditions that give rise to it. Last year, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president refused to accept defeat and attempted to overturn election results. Rather than oppose this attempted coup, leading Republicans either cooperated with it or enabled it by refusing to publicly acknowledge Trump’s defeat. In the run-up to January 6, most top GOP officials refused to denounce extremist groups that were spreading conspiracy theories, calling for armed insurrection and assassinations, and ultimately implicated in the Capitol assault. Few Republicans broke with Trump after his incitement of the insurrection, and those who did were censured by their state parties. From November 2020 to January 2021, then, a significant portion of the Republican Party refused to unambiguously accept electoral defeat, eschew violence, or break with extremist groups—the three principles that define prodemocracy parties. Because of that behavior, as well as its behavior over the past six months, we are convinced that the Republican Party leadership is willing to overturn an election. Moreover, we are concerned that it will be able to do so—legally. That’s why we serve on the board of advisers to Protect Democracy, a nonprofit working to prevent democratic decline in the United States. We wrote this essay as part of “The Democracy Endgame,” the group’s symposium on the long-term strategy to fight authoritarianism.

Full Article: Will the GOP Steal the 2024 Election? – The Atlantic

National: Democrats craft voting bill with eye on Supreme Court fight | Brian Slodysko/Associated Press

As congressional Democrats gear up for another bruising legislative push to expand voting rights, much of their attention has quietly focused on a small yet crucial voting bloc with the power to scuttle their plans: the nine Supreme Court justices. Democrats face dim prospects for passing voting legislation through a narrowly divided Congress, where an issue that once drew compromise has become an increasingly partisan flashpoint. But as they look to reinstate key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era law diminished over the past decade by Supreme Court rulings, they have accepted the reality that any bill they pass probably will wind up in litigation — and ultimately back before the high court. The task of building a more durable Voting Rights Act got harder when the high court’s conservative majority on July 1 issued its second major ruling in eight years narrowing the law’s once robust power. “What it feels like is a shifting of the goal posts,” said Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the left-leaning Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Sparring in Congress for months has focused on a different Democratic bill overhauling elections, known as the For the People Act, which Republican senators blocked from debate on the chamber’s floor last month.

Full Article: Democrats craft voting bill with eye on Supreme Court fight

National: Trump’s still waging a war on truth — and it’s still bad for democracy | Doyle McManus/Los Angeles Times

Last month, as thousands of former President Trump’s loyal supporters waited for him at a rally in Ohio, a chant rose from the crowd. “Trump won!” they roared. “Trump won!” The former president agreed. “We won the election twice,” he said, “and it’s possible we’ll have to win it a third time.” Eight months after he lost convincingly to President Biden, Trump and his followers are studiously maintaining an alternative reality — and having remarkable success keeping the fiction alive. Almost two-thirds of GOP voters told pollsters in one recent survey that they’re still convinced the election was stolen — a number that hasn’t changed much since November. This isn’t a harmless exercise in political puffery; it deepens the polarization of American politics and weakens democracy. The charge that the election was stolen doesn’t merely flatter Trump; it’s also an attempt to delegitimize Biden. It makes it politically dangerous for Republicans in Congress to collaborate with the administration — for why would anyone loyal to Trump negotiate with a usurper?

Full Article: Trump’s still waging a war on truth – Los Angeles Times

National: The Republican Party’s top lawyer called election fraud arguments by Trump’s lawyers a ‘joke’ that could mislead millions | Josh Dawsey/The Washington Post

The Republican Party’s top lawyer warned in November against continuing to push false claims that the presidential election was stolen, calling efforts by some of the former president’s lawyers a “joke” that could mislead millions of people, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post. Justin Riemer, the Republican National Committee’s chief counsel, sought to discourage a Republican Party staffer from posting claims about ballot fraud on RNC accounts, the email shows, as attempts by Donald Trump and his associates to challenge results in a number of states, such as Arizona and Pennsylvania, intensified. “What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court,” Riemer, a longtime Republican lawyer, wrote to Liz Harrington, a former party spokeswoman, on Nov. 28, referring to Trump attorneys Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. “They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.” The email from Riemer to Harrington, which came about six weeks before a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, shows key figures in the party were privately disturbed by the false claims being made about the election by Trump and his supporters — even if they did not say so publicly.

Full Article: The RNC’s top lawyer called election fraud arguments by Trump?s lawyers Giuliani, Ellis a ‘joke’ – The Washington Post

National: DHS cybersecurity chief confirmed amid fallout from another ransomware attack | Geneva Sands/CNN

The Senate on Monday unanimously confirmed Jen Easterly to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division, a role that will be key in the administration’s cybersecurity efforts. Easterly, a two-time recipient of the Bronze Star, was nominated by President Joe Biden in April to be the second director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agency has been led in an acting capacity by career official Brandon Wales since then-director Chris Krebs was fired for pushing back against lies by then-President Donald Trump and his supporters about election security. Easterly’s confirmation comes at a crucial time for the administration as it works to respond to a flood of recent ransomware and cybersecurity incidents. She will assume the post on the heels of the ransomware attack targeting software vendor Kaseya, and in the wake of the SolarWinds breach and back-to-back ransomware attacks that crippled critical infrastructure companies — Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods. Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida had blocked a vote on Easterly’s confirmation for unrelated reasons, holding it up ahead of the July Fourth holiday weekend. Scott had previously said it wasn’t about Easterly or cybersecurity, but about DHS nominees and a “lack of accountability” from the Biden administration to address the border crisis.

Full Article: Jen Easterly: DHS cybersecurity chief confirmed amid fallout from another ransomware attack – CNNPolitics

National: Voting’s Hash Problem: When the System for Verifying the Integrity of Voting Software Lacks Integrity Itself | Kim Zetter/Zero Day

In September 2020, just weeks before voters went to the polls in one of the nation’s most critical and contentious presidential elections, state officials in Texas learned of a disturbing problem with election software used widely across their state and the country: a component of software provided by Election Systems and Software — the top voting machine maker in the country — didn’t work the way it was supposed to work. The component wasn’t involved in tabulating votes; instead it was a software tool provided by ES&S to help officials verify that the voting software installed on election equipment was the version of ES&S software certified by a federal lab, and that it hadn’t been altered by the vendor or anyone else since certification. But Texas officials learned that the tool — known as a hash-verification tool — would indicate that ES&S software matched the certified version of code even when no match had been performed. This meant election officials had been relying on an integrity check that had questionable integrity. When voters or security experts express concern that elections can be hacked, officials often cite the hash-verification process as one reason to trust election results. Hash verification involves running software through an algorithm to produce a cryptographic value, or hash, of the code. The hash — a string of letters and numbers — serves as a fingerprint of the program. If the software is altered and then run through the same hashing algorithm again, the hash that’s created won’t match the original hash. But Brian Mechler, an engineering scientist at Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered while testing ES&S software for the Texas secretary of state’s office last year, that the company’s hash verification tool didn’t always work correctly.

Full Article: Voting’s Hash Problem: When the System for Verifying the Integrity of Voting Software Lacks Integrity Itself – by Kim Zetter – Zero Day

National: In future elections, federal officials predict repeat of 2020 threats | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

Three federal cybersecurity officials told a roomful of county IT personnel Thursday that many of the threats to election security that manifested last year are likely to repeat themselves in future cycles. During a panel at the National Association of Counties’ annual conference at a hotel outside Washington, the officials — representing the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency and the FBI — reviewed findings released earlier this year by the intelligence community and federal law enforcement that showed that foreign governments attempted to wage online influence campaigns against voters, election officials and campaigns in 2020. While none of those efforts compromised the integrity of the election and the tabulation of ballots, they did run the risk of undermining both public trust in the voting process and the personal safety of election officials, said Geoff Hale, who runs the election security initiative at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He recounted an email campaign last October that sent intimidating messages to voters in Florida warning recipients to “Vote for Trump or else!” but that was quickly attributed to the government of Iran. “Iranian actors doxed a lot of election officials and targeted individuals as public servants to make them feel unsafe,” Hale said. “They need to rebuild trust as unbiased nonpartisan arbiters of process upholding our democracy.”

Full Article: In future elections, federal officials predict repeat of 2020 threats

New Laws Let Americans With Disabilities Vote Online. They’ve Also Resurrected The Debate About Voting Access vs. Election Security. | Kaleigh Rogers/FiveThirtyEight

Full Article: New Laws Let Americans With Disabilities Vote Online. They’ve Also Resurrected The Debate About Voting Access vs. Election Security. | FiveThirtyEight

Since the dawn of the internet, someone has inevitably raised this question every election cycle: Why can’t we vote online? (The question was particularly apt in 2020, when states had to grapple with how to run an election during a pandemic.) And every time, election security experts dutifully answer that there is currently no technological way to guarantee a secure online ballot. Despite that, some Americans are able to vote online — namely, military and overseas voters — and they have been for more than a decade. Now a handful of states have started expanding this access to include voters with disabilities. Colorado passed a law in May allowing voters with certain disabilities to return ballots online, Nevada passed a similar law in June and other states like West Virginia are piloting the option. Last month in North Carolina, a federal judge ordered the state to permanently expand access to online ballot return to voters with vision disabilities — access that was temporarily granted for the November 2020 election, after a coalition of groups including the North Carolina Council of the Blind filed a lawsuit against the state board of elections. These new laws have reinvigorated a longstanding debate over whether there should be exceptions to the no-online-voting stance. That debate gets at one of the core tensions in election infrastructure: Voting access and voting security are both essential for democracy, but prioritizing one often comes at the expense of the other.

National: Attempted Hack of R.N.C. and Russian Ransomware Attack Test Biden | Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger/The New York Times

Russian hackers are accused of breaching a contractor for the Republican National Committee last week, around the same time that Russian cybercriminals launched the single largest global ransomware attack on record, incidents that are testing the red lines set by President Biden during his high-stakes summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month. The R.N.C. said in a statement on Tuesday that one of its technology providers, Synnex, had been hacked. While the extent of the attempted breach remained unclear, the committee said none of its data had been accessed. Early indications were that the culprit was Russia’s S.V.R. intelligence agency, according to investigators in the case. The S.V.R. is the group that initially hacked the Democratic National Committee six years ago and more recently conducted the SolarWinds attack that penetrated more than a half-dozen government agencies and many of the largest U.S. corporations. The R.N.C. attack was the second of apparent Russian origin to become public in the last few days, and it was unclear late Tuesday whether the two were related. On Sunday, a Russian-based cybercriminal organization known as REvil claimed responsibility for a cyberattack over the long holiday weekend that has spread to 800 to 1,500 businesses around the world. It was one of the largest attacks in history in which hackers shut down systems until a ransom is paid, security researchers said.

Full Article: Attempted Hack of R.N.C. and Russian Ransomware Attack Test Biden – The New York Times

National: The Chris Krebs case for including election systems as critical infrastructure | Asha Barbaschow/ZDNet

Cybersecurity expert and former United States CISA chief Chris Krebs has testified before an Australian security and intelligence committee, providing a case as to why policymakers should consider adding elements of the country’s election system to the list of what constitutes as critical infrastructure. “I think there are elements of the election administration function that should absolutely be considered critical infrastructure, and that is the administration element,” he said. “That’s the systems, the machines, the counting process, the protocols around it — I think it’s, at least in the US, a step too far to call the political parties themselves as part of the infrastructure, but they do have certainly a contribution and a piece involvement.” The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) is currently looking into Australia’s Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020, which, among other things, looks to bring more sectors into the definition of “critical infrastructure”. These are communications, financial services and markets, data storage and processing — including cloud providers — defence industry, higher education and research, energy, food and grocery, healthcare and medical, space technology, transport, and water and sewerage sectors. Krebs said Russian interference in the 2016 US election led the focus for the 2020 election to be on thwarting technical attacks and disruptions of election systems by ransomware attacks against voter registration databases, and of media outlet hacks, both on websites and television, such as changing the results on the live tally.

Full Article: The Chris Krebs case for including election systems as critical infrastructure | ZDNet

National: GOP-Led States Grab for More Control Over Election Disputes | Nic Querolo/Bloomberg

New limits on who can vote and how in the U.S. drew the most attention as Republicans rewrote voting rules after losing the presidential election. But a subset of those bills threatens to expose the ballot counting itself to an unprecedented level of partisan politics. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp signed a measure increasing state lawmakers’ control of the election board. Arkansas shifted oversight of complaints from county clerks and local prosecutors to a mostly Republican group of appointees. Iowa gave its elected secretary of state more oversight over county officials and created criminal punishments for infractions like failing to maintain voting lists properly. The Republican push — such as curtailing mail-in voting — took on greater significance after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld two Arizona voting restrictions, rejecting claims that they discriminate against racial minorities. The ruling put new limits on the reach of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965 during a segregated era, and may intensify the voting-rights battles fought out at the state level. While determined voters may overcome restricted access to the polls, the oversight bills represent a more fundamental change: one that increases the likelihood that lawmakers caught up in fractious politics could sway election results. “There is no question that we are seeing an increased risk,” said Derek Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. “But it’s an open question about how it applies in the future.”

Full Article: How Republicans Are Grabbing Control With New State Laws on Voting Rights – Bloomberg

National: After a Nightmare Year, Election Officials Are Quitting | Michael Wines/The New York Times

In November, Roxanna Moritz won her fourth term unopposed as the chief election officer in metro Davenport, Iowa, with more votes than any other candidate on the ballot. Five months later, she quit. “I emotionally couldn’t take the stress anymore,” she said in an interview. For Ms. Moritz, a Democrat, the initial trigger was a Republican-led investigation into her decision to give hazard pay to poll workers who had braved the coronavirus pandemic last fall. But what sealed her decision was a new law enacted by the Iowa legislature in February that made voting harder — and imposed fines and criminal penalties on election officials for errors like her failure to seek approval for $9,400 in extra pay. “I could be charged with a felony. I could lose my voting rights,” she said. “So I decided to leave.” Ms. Moritz is one casualty of a year in which election officials were repeatedly threatened, scapegoated and left exhausted — all while managing a historically bitter presidential vote during a pandemic. She has company. In 14 southwestern Ohio counties, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections has left. One in four election officials in Kansas either quit or lost re-election in November. Twenty-one directors or deputies have left or will leave election posts in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, according to a tally by the reporting consortiums Spotlight PA and Votebeat. Some of those represent ordinary churn in a job where many appointees are nearing retirement, and others are subject to the vagaries of elections. In a survey of some 850 election officials by Reed College and the Democracy Fund in April, more than one in six said they planned to retire before the 2024 election.

Full Article: 2020 Election Spurs Resignations and Retirements of Officials – The New York Times

National: What’s keeping democracy experts up most at night? An overturned election | Benjy Sarlin/NBC

Congress is just beginning a new investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, but the movement behind it remains as active as ever. Former President Donald Trump is frequently repeating false claims of victory, plotting revenge against politicians who opposed his efforts to overturn the election, attacking key Republicans who refuse to back him up now and hinting at a return to power, either through another presidential run or some other means. There’s no legal avenue for Trump to reverse the 2020 results. But a half-dozen scholars who study democracy and election laws told NBC News they are increasingly worried that 2024 could be a repeat of 2020, only with a party further remade in the former president’s image and better equipped to sow disorder during the process and even potentially overturn the results. “Obviously the insurrection was horrific in its violence and assault on democracy, but it didn’t disrupt the true winner of the election,” said Edward B. Foley, a professor at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University who researches election law. “What you don’t want is it to have been a rehearsal.”

Full Article: What’s keeping democracy experts up most at night? An overturned election

National: They kept the wheels on democracy as Trump tried to steal an election. Now they’re paying the price | Jess Bidgood/The Boston Globe

Bill Gates, a Republican member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, never used to feel like persona non grata in the party that’s long been his political home. A nuts-and-bolts functionary who can expound upon issues like air quality and animal control, he has a 10th-floor office adorned with mementos that show his many years of devotion to the GOP, including a taxidermied “jackalope” given to him by a Koch brothers-backed organization, and a framed photograph of him greeting George W. Bush in front of Air Force One. But then he and his colleagues on the board certified the 2020 election in their county, performing their ministerial function over the screams of angry Donald Trump supporters outside. Since then, Gates’s once-mundane job has taken a nightmare turn. He has been deluged with violent threats, named in Trump’s and his allies’ lawsuits and called by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, asking him to “get this thing fixed up.” He even found himself and his colleagues one vote short of being held in contempt by the state Senate — an outcome he feared could lead his most unhinged detractors to detain him. He wants to keep his job, hard as it’s been, and run for reelection in 2024. But he knows his decision to defy his party’s leaders and stand by the election results could doom his chances. “You’re like, OK, is there a place for me? Is there a place for someone who does — who tries to do — the right thing? Who speaks truth, who isn’t willing to follow the current Republican talking points?” Gates asked last month. “It’s just not what I believe in,” he said. “I don’t believe in the big lie.”

Full Article: They kept the wheels on democracy as Trump tried to steal an election. Now they’re paying the price – The Boston Globe

National: In ramp-up to 2022 midterms, Republican candidates center pitches on Trump’s false election claims | Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

A candidate to be Arizona’s top elections official said recently he hopes a review of 2020 ballots underway in his state will lead to the reversal of former president Donald Trump’s defeat there. In Georgia, a member of Congress who used to focus primarily on culturally conservative causes such as opposing same-sex marriage has made Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen a central element of his bid to try to unseat the current secretary of state. And in Virginia last month, a political novice who joined Trump’s legal team to try to overturn his 2020 loss in court mounted a fierce primary challenge — and won — after attacking a Republican state House member who said he had seen no evidence of widespread fraud in the election. “He wasn’t doing anything — squat, diddly,” Wren Williams said in an interview about his primary opponent. “He wasn’t taking election integrity seriously. I’m sitting here fighting for election integrity in the courts, and he’s my elected representative who can legislate and he’s not.”

Full Article: In ramp-up to 2022 midterms, Republican candidates center pitches on Trump’s false election claims – The Washington Post

National: Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions | Adam Liptak/The New York Times

The Supreme Court on Thursday gave states new latitude to impose restrictions on voting, using a ruling in a case from Arizona to signal that challenges to laws being passed by Republican legislatures that make it harder for minority groups to vote would face a hostile reception from a majority of the justices. The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The decision was among the most consequential in decades on voting rights, and it was the first time the court had considered how a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to restrictions that have a particular impact on people of color. The six conservative justices in the majority concluded that the relevant part of the act can be used to strike down voting restrictions only when they impose substantial and disproportionate burdens on minority voters, effectively blocking their ability to cast a ballot — a standard suggesting that the Supreme Court would not be inclined to overturn many of the measures Republicans have pursued or approved around the country.

Full Article: Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions – The New York Times

National: Trump audit excitement meets with fear from election officials Zach Montellaro/Politico

A monthslong examination of all the ballots from the 2020 election in Arizona’s most populous county may be winding down soon. But now the state is spreading the “audit” playbook across the country. Supporters of former President Donald Trump — fueled by Trump’s false claim that he did not lose the 2020 election — are behind a new push to review the results in states including Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The new drive is worrying state election administrators, who say the efforts will further inflame conspiracy theories and erode faith in the American democratic system. The burden of these reviews could fall on the shoulders of state and local election officials, further complicating a field where many are worried about a brain drain due to exhaustion and threats workers faced in the aftermath of the 2020 election. “We’re wasting a lot of taxpayer money. We’re wasting a lot of people’s time,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former elections administrator and consultant who served as a nonpartisan observer for the Arizona secretary of state during the Arizona review. “We’re sucking a lot of energy from the folks that need to be preparing and working on the next election.”

Full Article: Trump audit excitement meets with fear from election officials – POLITICO

National: Voting rights ruling increases pressure on Democrats to act | Bryan Slodisko and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Congressional Democrats are facing renewed pressure to pass legislation that would protect voting rights after a Supreme Court ruling Thursday made it harder to challenge Republican efforts to limit ballot access in many states. The 6-3 ruling on a case out of Arizona was the second time in a decade that conservatives on the Supreme Court have weakened components of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark Civil Rights-era law. But this opinion was released in a much different political climate, in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s lie that last year’s election was stolen. Trump’s fabrications spurred Republicans in states such as Georgia and Florida to pass tougher rules on voting under the cloak of election integrity. Democrats on Capitol Hill have already tried to respond with a sweeping voting and elections bill that Senate Republicans united to block last week. A separate bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore sections of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court previously weakened, has been similarly dismissed by most Republicans. Those setbacks, combined with the Supreme Court’s decision, have fueled a sense of urgency among Democrats to act while they still have narrow majorities in the House and Senate. But passing voting legislation at this point would almost certainly require changes to the filibuster, allowing Democrats to act without GOP support.

Full Article: Voting rights ruling increases pressure on Democrats to act

National: Giuliani’s Messages With Fox Sought by Dominion in Election Suit | Erik Larson/Bloomberg

Rudy Giuliani, already being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems Inc. over his debunked election-conspiracy claims, has been issued a subpoena in a similar lawsuit the company filed against Fox News Network. The former New York mayor and Donald Trump’s personal lawyer was asked to hand over all documents stemming from his appearances on Fox starting in 2016 as well as all communications with the network related to the 2020 presidential election and Dominion, according to a June 28 filing in state court in Delaware. The subpoena also seeks Giuliani’s communications concerning the “truth or falsity” of the claims he made about Dominion while appearing on Fox, plus documents about the nature of his relationship with the network, “whether formal or informal, compensated or uncompensated.” Giuliani is fighting to dismiss the defamation suit filed against him by Dominion in Washington, as are former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and MyPillow Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mike Lindell. All three repeatedly claimed without evidence that Dominion and its employees were at the center of a plot to flip millions of votes away from Trump, with help from foreign hackers, corrupt Democrats and “communist money.”

Full Article: Allen Weisselberg, Trump Organization CFO, Surrenders to Authorities in NY – Bloomberg

National: Threats Against Election Officials Are a Threat to Democracy | Sue Halpern/The New Yorker

For Tina Barton, the death threats began a few days after last November’s general election. At the time, Barton was in her eighth year as the clerk of Rochester Hills, a city of seventy-five thousand people in southeastern Michigan, where her many responsibilities included administering elections. On the evening of November 3rd, after the city’s election results were transmitted to a central tabulator, it looked like the absentee ballots for some precincts had not been included, so Barton and her crew resubmitted them. The next morning, when they realized that these ballots had, in fact, been transmitted the first time, the mistake was fixed. Barton assumed that was the end of it. Within days, Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, held a press conference in nearby Bloomfield Hills. Although Barton was appointed by a nonpartisan city council, she is a Republican and considered McDaniel an ally. “I was never called by them to say, ‘Hey, Tina, what happened there?’ ” Barton said. “There was never, like, let’s check the facts.” Instead, at the press conference, McDaniel falsely claimed that two thousand votes for Trump had gone to Biden. “It was a complete mischaracterization,” Barton told me. “They needed language to support the agenda that they were pushing, and they used me, specifically, for the shock factor, because I was a Republican. I think they were trying to make the case that, if it could happen in Rochester Hills, it could happen anywhere.” Barton posted an explanatory video on Twitter, which quickly amassed more than a million views. A torrent of death threats followed, left on her office voice mail and sent via Facebook Messenger. “To have someone say you deserve a knife to your throat, that you should be executed, that they are going to eff up your family, shakes you,” she said. “And I’m fortunate. My husband is a sheriff’s deputy. That added a layer of security a lot of election officials don’t have.” Barton is now a senior adviser to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (E.A.C.), where she works with election administrators all over the country. “These are true public servants,” she said. “They are in it because they have a passion for democracy. And now they are asking themselves if they are willing to put themselves and their families at risk to do this job.”

Full Article: Threats Against Election Officials Are a Threat to Democracy | The New Yorker

National: A racist myth of immigrants voting fuels claims of fraud | Paige St. John/Los Angeles Times

For more than three decades, the racist myth has circulated around elections, often told in rich detail, of undocumented immigrants traveling poll to poll to vote illegally. In some variations, they travel by bus. In others, a van, usually white. Occasionally, the story goes, the perpetrators are caught, but usually not. But the core of this canard remained generally the same as it spread out of California and into national politics. The story has been used by political candidates, anti-immigration activists and election “watchdog” activists recruiting volunteers and seeking restrictions on voting. For national audiences, it has been invoked by right-wing provocateurs and broadcast by Russian trolls seeking to influence U.S. elections. President Trump falsely claimed that millions of immigrants living in the country illegally voted in 2016 and, separately, that hundreds of buses carried voters across state lines to cast ballots in the New Hampshire election. In that same election year, the fable of the traveling voters appeared in Arizona, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. One account described voters only as Black and said they were driven into Alabama to cast ballots in a special election. The vast majority of the stories targeted Latinos, and often in derogatory terms. In those ways, they are not unlike other bald fictions used in U.S. history to justify voting restrictions against immigrating Catholics, Irish and Chinese people, freed Black Americans and others. In the 1800s, for instance, arrivals from Ireland were accused of registering to vote as they stepped off the boat.

Full Article: A racist myth of immigrants voting fuels claims of fraud – Los Angeles Times

National: Political campaigns worry they’re next for ransomware hits | Julia Manchester and Maggie Miller/The Hill

Political campaigns are ramping up their protections, worrying the next in a rising number of ransomware attacks could target them. Cyber criminals have gone after an ever-increasing number of targets, from Colonial Pipeline to JBS USA. And political campaigns are painfully familiar with risks after the 2016 attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC). “I…

National: William Barr calls Trump’s election fraud claims: ‘bullshit’ in new book | Mychael Schnell/The Hill

Former Attorney General William Barr reportedly called former President Trump’s false claims of election fraud “bullshit,” according to a new book on the final days of the Trump administration. The revelation comes from the book “Betrayal,” authored by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl. The book is set to be released in November. The Atlantic published an excerpt from the book on Sunday, providing key details of Barr’s relationship with Trump in the waning days of the administration and a peek into the then-attorney general’s thoughts on Trump’s repeated and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. “My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told Karl in an interview, referring to why he decided to give prosecutors approval to probe the fraud allegations and why he opened his own unofficial inquiry into the claims. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit,” Barr added. The former attorney general also said that allegations that voting machines across the country were rigged to switch votes from President Biden to Trump were not true. “We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told Karl.

Full Article: William Barr calls Trump’s election fraud claims: ‘bulls—‘ in new book | TheHill

National: Justice Department to launch task force to address rise in threats against election officials | Evan Perez and Christina Carrega/CNN

The Justice Department announced on Friday that it is launching a task force to address the rise in threats against election officials, according to a memo sent to all federal prosecutors and the FBI. “The Department of Justice has a long history of protecting every American’s right to vote, and will continue to do so. To that end, we must also work tirelessly to protect all election workers—whether they be elected officials, appointed officials, or those who volunteer their time—against the threats they face,” according to the memo written by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Jurisdictions across the country, especially with high-stake local elections like in Fulton County, Georgia, reported receiving threats and racist taunts. In a speech earlier this month, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a number of steps that the Justice Department would take over the next 30 days to protect every citizen’s right to vote that included doubling the staff in the Civil Rights Division.

Full Article: DOJ to launch task force to address rise in threats against election officials – CNNPolitics

National: Mike Pence: Idea of overturning election results is ‘un-American’ | Michael R. Blood and Jill Colvin/Associated Press