National

Most CEOs on a call to discuss a new push against U.S. state voting restrictions said in a poll they will reassess donating to candidates who fail to support voting rights, while many will consider holding back investments in states that restrict voting access, according to people familiar with the matter. Some business executives are putting together a new statement calling for the protection of U.S. voting rights, the latest corporate backlash against moves by Republican politicians to change election rules in Georgia and other states, the sources said. About 100 chief executive officers, investors, lawyers and corporate directors participated in a private Zoom call on Saturday organized by Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld to discuss a new response to Georgia’s election law and voting restrictions contemplated by other states such as Texas and Arizona, according to the sources. All CEOs who participated in a poll during the call agreed they will re-evaluate political donations to candidates based on their track records on voting rights, while 48% said they might reconsider or reduce investments in states that restrict access to voting. Some one-quarter of CEOs refrained from voting on several questions in the poll.

Full Article: Corporate leaders plan new push on U.S. voting rights, will reconsider campaign donations | Reuters

National: The great capitulation of Trump’s voter fraud crusade | Aaron Blake/The Washington Post

The 2020 election is a case study in how unproved claims can be weaponized. For decades, former president Donald Trump’s party warned of significant voter fraud while successfully pushing policies such as voter ID. In 2016, Trump laid a predicate for contesting an election by suggesting there was massive fraud, even in an election he had won. By 2020, when Trump lost, it culminated in a huge portion of the electorate believing a “stolen election” theory for which there is vanishingly little actual evidence. Some have done more than raise questions, though. They, like Trump and often in search of his allies’ support, have alleged actual massive fraud. But now they’ve been asked to account for it. And crucially and increasingly, they have backed down. The most recent example came Friday night — a time routinely used to bury bad news. In a statement, former Trump lawyer Joe diGenova apologized to Christopher Krebs, a Trump administration official who had debunked Trump’s fraud claims and whose execution diGenova had endorsed. DiGenova had said Krebs “should be drawn and quartered” and “taken out at dawn and shot.” “On November 30, 2020, I appeared on the ‘Howie Carr Show.’ During the show, I made regrettable statements regarding Christopher Krebs, which many interpreted as a call for violence against him,” diGenova said. He added that “today I reiterate my public apology to Mr. Krebs and his family for any harm my words caused. Given today’s political climate, I should have more carefully expressed my criticism of Mr. Krebs, who was just doing his job.” DiGenova’s apology refers to a past apology made on Newsmax’s airwaves, but back then he went even further in downplaying his comments. He maintained at the time that it was a poorly chosen joke and said that he apologized “for any misunderstanding of my intentions.” The statement very notably comes months after Krebs announced in December that he was suing diGenova for defamation.

Full Article: The great capitulation of Trump’s voter fraud crusade – The Washington Post

National: Amid a Wave of Hacks, Biden Moves to Fill Key Cyber Posts | Dustin Volz/Wall Street Journal

President Biden intends to nominate two former National Security Agency officials to high-level cybersecurity positions, the White House said Monday, rounding out the administration’s personnel on an issue it has said is a priority in the wake of two recent hacks linked to foreign governments. Mr. Biden is planning to nominate Jen Easterly, a former senior counterterrorism and cybersecurity official at NSA with experience at the Obama White House, to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for election security and protecting civilian government networks from hackers, as well as securing the nation’s critical infrastructure from both physical and cyber threats. Chris Inglis, the former deputy director of the NSA, has been tapped to be nominated as the first-ever national cyber director. The position, housed within the Executive Office of the President, was created through a provision in the annual defense policy spending legislation that passed Congress in January. The role is intended to coordinate cybersecurity efforts across the federal government and will include its own office with up to 75 staff. The structure generally resembles that of the Office of the United States Trade Representative. “If confirmed, Chris and Jen will add deep expertise, experience and leadership to our world-class cyber team,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said. “We are determined to protect America’s networks and to meet the growing challenge posed by our adversaries in cyberspace—and this is the team to do it.” Mr. Biden will also name Rob Silvers, a partner at the international law firm Paul Hastings, as undersecretary for policy at DHS. Mr. Silvers, who focuses on cybersecurity and privacy issues in his practice and has experience with cybersecurity work at DHS during the Obama administration—including guarding the 2016 election from Russian interference—had for months been rumored to be in contention for the CISA job as well. His undersecretary job, if he is confirmed, will also focus heavily but not entirely on cybersecurity issues, the people said.

Full Article: Amid a Wave of Hacks, Biden Moves to Fill Key Cyber Posts – WSJ

National: First-of-its-kind meeting draws more than 100 corporate leaders to discuss state voting laws | Ed O’Keefe/CBS News

More than 100 of the nation’s top corporate leaders met virtually on Saturday to discuss ways for companies to continue responding to the passage of more restrictive voting laws across the country, a signal that the nation’s premier businesses are preparing a far more robust, organized response to the ongoing debate. With some CEOs chiming in from Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament, attendees on the high-level Zoom call included leaders from the health care, media and transportation sectors and some of the nation’s leading law and investment firms. “The gathering was an enthusiastic voluntary statement of defiance against threats of reprisals for exercising their patriotic voices,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University management professor who helped organize the confab. The corporate leaders “recognize that they need to step up to the plate and are not fearful of these reprisals,” he added. “They’re showing a disdain for these political attacks. Not only are they fortifying each other, but they see that this spreading of disease of voter restrictions from Georgia to up to possibly 46 other states is based on a false premise and its’ anti-democratic.”

Full Article: First-of-its-kind meeting draws more than 100 corporate leaders to discuss state voting laws – CBS News

National: How Voting Laws Suppress the ‘New South’ | Lisa Hagen and Susan Milligan/US News

Looking back in an election cycle or two, it may be that the political and economic fallout gripping Georgia today over its controversial new voter law proves to have been a sign of an inevitable march toward a very different electoral map. The next frontier in the battle over voting rights is already creeping toward other states across the South and the Sun Belt that have two things in common: They are all seeing a similar rapid demographic shift in their electorates that stands to reimagine the American political landscape. And they have entrenched political interests trying to stop it. After a year of record turnout, especially among voters of color in Southern states, and a barrage of unfounded fraud claims propagated by the former president, GOP-led state legislatures are leading the charge to challenge and amend voting laws. They saw their first big success last month in Georgia. That sweeping law among other things imposes identification requirements for absentee ballots, limits ballot drop boxes and shortens runoff elections. Measures with similar implications in Texas and Arizona, meanwhile, are now steadily gaining traction. Like Georgia, these once-reliably red strongholds have been dramatically reshaped in recent years and are likely to keep trending further away from Republicans. In 2020, Democrats clinched major victories at both the presidential and Senate levels in Georgia and Arizona last year, though Texas has moved toward them at a slower pace.

Full Article: How Voting Laws Suppress the ‘New South’ | The Report | US News

The next Georgia: Texas and Arizona emerge as voting rights battlegrounds | Sam Levine/The Guardian

As Georgia Republicans face backlash over new sweeping voting restrictions, activists in other states are escalating efforts to oppose similar restrictions advancing in other states. Texas and Arizona have emerged as two of the next major battlegrounds over voting rights. Texas Republicans last week advanced legislation that would limit early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and give partisan poll workers the ability to record voters at the polls, among other measures. In Arizona, Republicans are moving ahead with an audit of ballots from the presidential race while also advancing legislation that would make it harder to vote by mail. Nationally lawmakers have introduced 361 bills to limit access to the ballot in some way, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Fifty-five of those bills are advancing in legislatures. After companies like Delta and Coca-Cola faced criticism for waiting too long to speak out against the Georgia legislation, advocates have been heartened by swift corporate condemnation of the Texas measure. American Airlines, which is based in Texas, said on Thursday it was “strongly opposed” to the Texas legislation. Microsoft and Dell also spoke out against the measures. Major League Baseball announced on Friday it was moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new law. Joe Straus, the former speaker of the Texas house of representatives, also came out against the measures on Thursday, tweeting that businesses had “good reason” to oppose the bill. “Texas should not go down the same path as Georgia. It’s bad for business and, more importantly, it’s bad for our citizens,” he said.

Full Article: The next Georgia: Texas and Arizona emerge as voting rights battlegrounds | US voting rights | The Guardian

Protecting American Democracy Is No Crime – New Laws Could Make Election Officials Legal Targets | Lawrence Norden/Foreign Affairs

In the past 12 months, American election officials have been heralded for their courage and commitment in carrying out the most logistically challenging election in modern times—with record turnout, no less. They have also been attacked as villains by those who believe the Big Lie, that the election was somehow stolen from then President Donald Trump. Election officials—who before 2020 had been largely ignored by the Twittersphere and conspiracy theorists—became the targets of thousands of false accusations, protests at their workplaces, and even harassment and threats. Such mistreatment is now taking a new and possibly even more sinister form. Legislation in several states proposes to strip election officials of their power to act on behalf of voters and to criminalize various actions they might take in the course of performing their duties. These bills add the danger of arrest and prosecution to already challenging working conditions. They should be beaten back by all who are committed to preserving American democracy. The recently passed law in Georgia is just one example. The law has rightly been criticized for its suppressive provisions, such as one that makes it a crime for volunteers to provide in-person voters with water, even when they’ve been waiting in line for hours. Less noticed are provisions that take key powers away from election officials. SB 202 removes Georgia’s secretary of state—who stood up to Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 results—from the position of chair of the state election board and turns control of the board over to the state legislature. That newly constituted board is in turn given more power to intervene in the activity of local election boards, including by removing and replacing local board members. Reasonable people can disagree as to what is the best structure of a state election board, but all should be opposed to retaliating against an office for its holder’s refusal to bend to inappropriate and extreme political pressure.

Full Article: Protecting American Democracy Is No Crime | Foreign Affairs

National: How some states are expanding voting rights amid sweeping push to restrict access | Kendall Karson/ABC

The GOP’s rush to impose hundreds of voting restrictions in the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss comes as a burgeoning number of states are pressing ahead with an alternative ambition: making voting easier. The effort might seem like an outlier at a time when Republicans are scaling back voting access across the country and being condemned by Democrats for ushering in a new era of “Jim Crow.” In the aftermath of former President Donald Trump and his allies spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, at least 361 bills aimed at restricting ballot access have been introduced as of March 24, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. But the push to embrace broadening access to the voting booth isn’t few and far between. In fact, lawmakers in at least 47 states are putting forward more than 800 bills to expand the right to vote. As the nation seems bitterly fractured over election rules, in the heart of Trump country, one red state appears to be the lone exception so far. Kentucky lawmakers agreed on a bipartisan and modest expansion of voting rights, melded with some new restrictions to address election security. The new law, which was signed by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear on Wednesday, sets tighter restrictions on who is eligible to vote-by-mail compared to the 2020 election, but it also provides three days for early voting, establishes vote centers to increase options for casting a ballot in-person, and creates an online portal for voters to request mail-in ballots.

Full Article: How some states are expanding voting rights amid sweeping push to restrict access – ABC News

National: Nation Has Georgia on Its Mind but Many States Are Making Voting Easier | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

During the waning days of the presidential election, Vermont Democratic state Sen. Cheryl Hooker got a desperate call from one of her constituents: The woman said she had forgotten to sign her name on the absentee ballot, it had been rejected by the town clerk and she couldn’t fix it. This was a familiar story around the country, as the pandemic forced voters and election administrators to take a crash course in mail-in voting. “People make mistakes,” said Hooker, who couldn’t help her constituent at the time. “They don’t sign the outside envelope, or they forget to put their name on it. Their vote would not count.” When Vermont’s legislative session began earlier this year, Hooker introduced a measure that would create a process for voters to “cure” signatures or other technical mistakes on mail-in ballots. Lawmakers added provisions that would allow the state to mail ballots to every active voter before general elections. The bill passed the state Senate, is on track to pass the state House, according to Hooker, and has support from Republican Gov. Phil Scott. The national conversation around voting rights this year has focused on new ballot restrictions in states such as Arizona and Georgia. Less noticed have been efforts by states such as Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont and Virginia to expand voting by mail, early voting and voter registration. Lawmakers, mostly in heavily Democratic states, aim to loosen restrictions on the voting process, hoping to continue the trend of record turnout that most states saw last year. Lawmakers in 47 states have introduced nearly 850 bills to expand early voting, restore voting rights for people with felony convictions and set up automatic voter registration, among other measures, according to a late March count by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. This is more than twice the number of restrictive voting bills introduced this session.

Full Article: Nation Has Georgia on Its Mind but Many States Are Making Voting Easier | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: Fifteen years ago, Smartmatic was drummed out of the United States by Lou Dobbs—but now he’s off the air and the voting machine company is attempting an American foothold once more. | Madeline Berg/Forbes

In the wake of last year’s presidential election, as Donald Trump was pushing his counterfactual narrative about vote rigging, Antonio Mugica watched Smartmatic, his little-known U.K. voting machine business become a bogeyman on right-wing media. The London-based company burst into the headlines—along with Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems—as rumors spread on social media that both companies were being shut down, their executives on the run. Some said Smartmatic, which provided machines just for Los Angeles county in 2020, secretly owned the much larger Dominion, which tallied votes in more than two dozen states. “This was so outrageous and crazy,” says Smartmatic’s 46-year-old CEO Mugica, in a rare in-depth interview. “I thought, no one would believe it.” But they did. Smartmatic promptly filed a defamation suit against Fox, three of its anchors and two Trump loyalists for $2.7 billion in financial damages, which is how much more Smartmatic’s Venezuelan cofounders say their company would be worth in the next five years if it weren’t for the ginned up controversy. (Forbes values Smartmatic, which is privately held, at an estimated $730 million. The Mugica family’s 66% stake is worth about $480 million. The other cofounder, Roger Piñate, and his family have a 19% stake. The company had an estimated $115 million in revenue last year.) The fake news story cost Smartmatic $500 million in potential profits over five years, according to the lawsuit, and derailed their plans to expand into the U.S. (This claim seems somewhat optimistic given that Smartmatic booked $450 million in profits in total over the last 12 years). Dominion filed its own $1.6 billion suit six weeks later, blaming the network for taking “a small flame and turning it into a forest fire.” Fox has filed four. motions to dismiss Smartmatic’s suit, citing the company’s First Amendment rights and claiming the content was a matter of public concern.

Full Article: This Foreign Voting Machine Company Wants To Take Over America – If It Can Get Through Fox News

HP, Dow, Estee Lauder among 200 companies speaking out against proposed state voting laws | Hannah Denham and Jena McGregor/The Washington Post

April 6, 2021

Nearly 200 companies on Friday joined in a strong statement against proposals that threaten to restrict voting access in dozens of states, in a further sign of corporate willingness to speak out on social justice issues. As Major League Baseball announced that it will be moving this summer’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to the passage of Georgia’s restrictive voting law, executives from at least 193 companies — including Dow, HP, Twitter and Estée Lauder — urged the protection of voting rights across the country. “There are hundreds of bills threatening to make voting more difficult in dozens of states nationwide,” executives wrote in the statement, which also included signatures from the CEOs of Under Armour, Salesforce and ViacomCBS. “We call on elected leaders in every state capitol and in Congress to work across the aisle and ensure that every eligible American has the freedom to easily cast their ballot and participate fully in our democracy,” the statement said. The joint statement was organized by Civic Alliance, a nonpartisan group of businesses focused on voter engagement.

Full Article: HP, Dow, Estee Lauder among 200 companies speaking out against proposed state voting laws – The Washington Post

National: Pressure mounts on corporations to denounce GOP voting bills | Bill Barrow/Associated Press

April 6, 2021

Liberal activists are stepping up calls for corporate America to denounce Republican efforts to tighten state voting laws, and businesses accustomed to cozy political relationships now find themselves in the middle of a growing partisan fight over voting rights. Pressure is mounting on leading companies in Texas, Arizona and other states, particularly after Major League Baseball’s decision Friday to move the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta. A joint statement from executives at nearly 200 companies, including HP, Microsoft, PayPal, Target, Twitter, Uber and Under Armour, took aim at state legislation “threatening to make voting more difficult” and said “elections are not improved” when lawmakers impose new barriers to voting. The outcry comes a week after Georgia Republicans enacted an overhaul of the state’s election law that critics argue is an attempt to suppress Democratic votes. Other companies have, somewhat belatedly, joined the chorus of critics. Delta Air Lines and The Coca-Cola Co., two of Georgia’s best-known brands, this past week called the new law “unacceptable,” although they had a hand in writing it. That only angered Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp and several U.S. senators, who accused the companies of cowering from unwarranted attacks from the left. The fight has thrust corporate America into a place it often tries to avoid — the center of a partisan political fight. But under threat of boycott and bad publicity, business leaders are showing a new willingness to enter the fray on an issue not directly related to their bottom line, even if it means alienating Republican allies.

Full Article: Pressure mounts on corporations to denounce GOP voting bills

Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump’s empire of disinformation? | David Smith/The Guardian

April 6, 2021

Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against several Trump allies for pushing election ‘radioactive falsehoods’ – could it triumph? When Donald Trump and his allies pushed the “big lie” of voter fraud and a stolen election, it seemed nothing could stop them spreading disinformation with impunity. Politicians and activists’ pleas fell on deaf ears. TV networks and newspapers fact-checked in vain. Social media giants proved impotent. But now a little-known tech company, founded 18 years ago in Canada, has the conspiracy theorists running scared. The key: suing them for defamation, potentially for billions of dollars. “Libel laws may prove to be a very old mechanism to deal with a very new phenomenon of massive disinformation,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “We have all these fact checkers but lots of people don’t care. Nothing else seems to work, so maybe this will.” The David in this David and Goliath story is Dominion Voting Systems, an election machine company named after Canada’s Dominion Elections Act of 1920. Its main offices are in Toronto and Denver and it describes itself as the leading supplier of US election technology. It says it serves more than 40% of American voters, with customers in 28 states. But the 2020 election put a target on its back. As the White House slipped away and Trump desperately pushed groundless claims of voter fraud, his lawyers and cheerleaders falsely alleged Dominion had rigged the polls in favour of Joe Biden. Among the more baroque conspiracy theories was that Dominion changed votes through algorithms in its voting machines that were created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late dictator Hugo Chávez.

Full Article: Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump’s empire of disinformation? | US news | The Guardian

Big Lies vs. Big Lawsuits: Why Dominion Voting is suing Fox News and a host of Trump allies | Jen Wieczner/Fortune

On Dec. 9, Nicole Nollette, an executive at Dominion Voting Systems, was driving home from a doctor’s appointment when she noticed she’d missed a call from one of her customers. The client, an elections official whose jurisdiction uses Dominion’s voting machines, had also sent her a link to a website. Nollette pulled up the site on her phone and saw her own photo—overlaid with bright red crosshairs, as though she were in the sights of a sniper’s rifle. The website, which bore the moniker “Enemies of the People,” also included an address in Nevada, showing aerial views of that property beneath Nollette’s picture. That alarmed Nollette even more, because she doesn’t live in Nevada but in Colorado, where Dominion is based. The address was for the home of her retired parents. Months later, the Navy veteran remembers the fear in her mother’s voice over the phone as her parents loaded the website: “They have a picture of the house,” her mom gasped. Nollette was one of more than a dozen people, ranging from other Dominion employees to Trump administration officials, whose photos were posted on the website. The site accused them all of playing a role in an elaborate conspiracy to rig November’s presidential election by “flipping” votes for Donald Trump to Joe Biden—and relying on Dominion’s machines, which are in use in 28 states, to do it. Later that day, the FBI showed up on Nollette’s parents’ doorstep to alert them to the menace. Soon, Nollette herself received death threats—including one sent to her personal email address, warning, “Your days are numbered.” She still doesn’t know who sent them, though the FBI later notified Dominion and others that its intel had linked the hit list to Iran. The threats have tapered in the months since President Trump left the White House. But Nollette, who lives alone, still watches for suspicious cars around her street. And while she once made a daily habit of taking walks before sunrise and after sunset, she now goes out only in the light of day. “This is the first time since I left the military that, at least in terms of security and threats, I’ve had to engage that military training,” she says.

Full Article: Why Dominion Voting is suing Fox News and a host of Trump allies | Fortune

Why Are Republicans Promoting Gratuitously Cruel Election Restrictions? | Ed Kilgore/New York Magazine

Of all the numerous potholes on the path to the ballot box that Georgia Republicans dug in their recent “election security” legislation, one of the oddest, which has earned its sponsors much criticism (from the president of the United States, among others) is a ban on anyone giving food or water to citizens standing in line to vote. It seems gratuitously cruel, particularly given Georgia’s reputation for long voting lines during both early voting and on Election Day, especially in large urban precincts that skew heavily Black and Democratic. Defenders of Georgia’s new law argue that it only bans campaigns from bribing voters with food and drink and encourages poll workers to provide water. But a very close neutral analysis of the provision makes it clear that, at most, it allows for the establishment of unattended “self-service” water containers but doesn’t mandate them or make them necessarily convenient. It’s precisely the perception that it will negatively affect one party’s voters more than the other’s that may be fueling such new laws. (Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature is considering a similar restriction.) Whether or not hungry or thirsty voters in long lines will grow discouraged and go home, Republicans seem to think they may, and the alleged boost to the GOP’s election results is all the rationale that’s needed. Indeed, before the latest session of the Georgia General Assembly, Republican secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had been warning about food and water distribution in Georgia’s January 5 runoffs, arguing (erroneously, I believe) that existing laws aimed at keeping campaigns or other political organizations from rewarding voters with food or drink after they voted could be interpreted as creating a no-consumption zone around polling places. That is presumably why the hateful language found its way into Republican legislation — to make sure the hunger and thirst of Black and Democratic voters in places like metro Atlanta were not being slaked.

Full Article: Why Are Republicans Promoting Cruel Election Restrictions?

National: The States Where Efforts To Restrict Voting Are Escalating | Alex Samuels, Elena Mejía and Nathaniel Rakich/FiveThirtyEight

One of the biggest battlegrounds has been Georgia, where last Thursday a controversial package of new voter restrictions was signed into law. Among its many provisions: Absentee voters will now be required to prove their identity, people are prohibited from handing out food and water to voters waiting in line, and the state board of elections is empowered to remove local election officials. Legislators in Michigan and Wisconsin have also deemed “election integrity” a priority and introduced a raft of legislation to prohibit election administrators from proactively sending out vote-by-mail applications, tighten voter-ID requirements and more. But the push to restrict voting rights expands beyond just a few states. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights advocacy group, 253 bills to restrict voting access had been introduced in 43 state legislatures as of Feb. 19. And according to our own tracking, at least 53 additional bills have been introduced since then.¹ Of these 306 bills, 89 percent were sponsored entirely or primarily by Republicans, according to the bill-tracking service LegiScan. Notably, the four states where the greatest number of voting-restriction bills have been filed — Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania — were some of the closest states in last year’s presidential election. They also all voted for President Biden — the first time Georgia and Arizona voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in over two decades — and have Republican-controlled legislatures, making them especially fertile ground for new voting restrictions.

Full Article: The States Where Efforts To Restrict Voting Are Escalating | FiveThirtyEight

National: Election bills surge nationwide as 47 states consider restrictions | Jane C. Timm/NBC

Lawmakers introduced 108 restrictive voting bills in less than five weeks this spring, according to an analysis of the scope and momentum of election limits being considered across the country. By March 24, lawmakers had introduced 361 restrictive election bills in 47 legislatures, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which has been tracking the legislation. That’s 108 more than in the center’s last count, on Feb. 19, a 43 percent increase. Former President Donald Trump’s stolen election lie has inspired an avalanche of election-related bills nationwide. By all accounts, the 2020 election was secure and the results were accurate. Trump’s attorney general William Barr said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the results failed in courtrooms around the country. But that hasn’t stopped states from reducing access to the ballot box.

Full Article: Election bills surge nationwide as 47 states consider restrictions

National: Corporate pressures suggest new dynamics on voting rights | Rick Klein, Averi Harper , and Kendall Karson/ABC

It might look like it all came a week late. But it might be that the shifting corporate dynamics around voting rights are happening at the moment they will matter most. Delta Air Lines and the Coca-Cola Co., two Atlanta-based behemoths that issued vague statements supporting voting rights but did not publicly oppose Georgia’s new voting law before it passed, came out Wednesday with top executives blasting the law signed by the state’s Republican governor late last week. “This legislation is unacceptable. It is a step backwards,” Coca-Cola’s CEO said. His counterpart at Delta similarly called the law “not acceptable,” telling ABC’s “GMA3”: “Our Black communities’ voices need to be heard on this topic.” The revised corporate statements came on the same day that a coalition of Black business leaders, the Black Economic Alliance, ran an open-letter ad in The New York Times calling on corporate America to “support our nation’s fundamental democratic principles and marshal its collective influence.” It’s too late for Georgia businesses to help rewrite their state’s voting laws this year. But the Democratic Party of Georgia welcomed the statements, inviting the companies to join lobbying efforts for federal legislation pending on Capitol Hill.

Full Article: Corporate pressures suggest new dynamics on voting rights: The Note – ABC News

National: Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century | Jane Mayer/The New Yorker

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections. A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress. Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”

Full Article: Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century | The New Yorker

National: Think tank launches cybersecurity training for state officials | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

The nonprofit National Cybersecurity Center on Monday kicked off a new initiative to offer training sessions on cyber hygiene and IT security to elected officials in state governments and their staff members. The program will feature virtual briefings, on-demand workshops and other materials addressing not only good online safety measures, but also an overview of the many different cyberthreats state and local government face. “Cybersecurity is more important than ever with businesses, government, and private individuals falling victim to digital attacks everyday,” Forrest Senti the director of business and government initiatives at the Colorado Springs, Colorado, think tank said in a press release. The training series is backed in part by Google, which recently expanded its election-security products — such as physical multi-factor authentication keys — to state and local election administrators, after offering them to campaigns and candidates last year. Two secretaries of state, Republican Frank LaRose of Ohio and Democrat Jena Griswold of Colorado, also signed on Monday to be emissaries for the training program in their states, the National Cybersecurity Center said. “Americans must have confidence in their elections. That can’t happen if we aren’t vigilant in our defense of the digital systems that make up our election infrastructure,” LaRose, who last year became the first statewide elections chief to launch a vulnerability disclosure program, said in the press release. In an interview last month, Senti said the point of the training will be to provide state legislators, who are responsible for funding IT and cybersecurity policies, with information from industry experts from Senti’s organization as well as its industry partners, such as Google and Microsoft.

Full Article: Think tank launches cybersecurity training for state officials

National: NIST framework focuses on election cybersecurity | Justin Katz/FCW

The National Institute of Standards and Technology on Monday published a draft framework to help local election officials prepare for and respond to cyber threats. The framework takes NIST’s pre-existing cybersecurity best practices and applies them to election infrastructure such as polling places, voter registration databases and voting machines. “The guide can help these officials reduce the risk of disruptions to the major tasks they must perform in the process of an election,” according to NIST. “These range from the immediate concerns of an election day, such as vote processing or communicating the details of a problem or crisis, to longer-term efforts, like maintaining election and voter registration systems.” The new draft framework is the first time NIST has combined election security and cybersecurity in one of its playbooks, according to one of the authors.

Full Article: NIST framework focuses on election cybersecurity — FCW

National: Sidney Powell’s legal defense: ‘Reasonable people’ wouldn’t believe her election fraud claims | Jane C. Timm/NBC

Ex-Trump attorney Sidney Powell’s weekslong campaign to invalidate the results of the 2020 election was not based in fact, her lawyers said Monday. “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” Powell’s attorneys said in a court filing defending her against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, the manufacturer of the election equipment she claimed was involved in the conspiracy to steal the election. Powell, who for a time was part of former President Donald Trump’s legal team fighting the election results, repeatedly and baselessly claimed that votes were illegally switched on Dominion voting machines. Election experts and officials, as well as top law enforcement officials, have said the 2020 election results were accurate and there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. The filing Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia claims Powell’s statements were so absurd they couldn’t be taken seriously. “Plaintiffs themselves characterize the statements at issue as ‘wild accusations’ and ‘outlandish claims,'” her lawyers wrote. “They are repeatedly labeled ‘inherently improbable’ and even ‘impossible.’ Such characterizations of the allegedly defamatory statements further support defendant’s position that reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”

Full Article: Sidney Powell’s legal defense: ‘Reasonable people’ wouldn’t believe her election fraud claims

National: US intelligence report says election fraud claims ‘will almost certainly’ spur more violence by domestic extremists | Zachary Cohen and Geneva Sands/CNN

US intelligence agencies believe that “narratives of fraud in the recent general election” and “the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol” will “almost certainly” spur domestic extremists to try to engage in additional acts of violence this year, according to the unclassified summary of a new joint assessment released Wednesday. That warning was included in a comprehensive classified assessment of domestic violent extremism produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, which was ordered by the White House in January. The full report was transmitted to the White House and Congress. The summary was released on the same day that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told lawmakers domestic violent extremism is the “greatest threat” to the US — a clear reminder that federal officials remain very concerned about the potential for more violence in the coming months. “Newer sociopolitical developments — such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence — will almost certainly spur some (domestic violent extremists) to try to engage in violence this year,” the unclassified summary says.

Full Article: US intelligence report says election fraud claims ‘will almost certainly’ spur more violence by domestic extremists – CNNPolitics

National: U.S. Conducted More Than Two Dozen Pre-Election Cyber Operations | Alyza Sebenius/Bloomberg

The U.S. carried out more than two dozen operations to thwart adversaries from election meddling ahead of the 2020 presidential election, according to a top intelligence official. General Paul Nakasone, the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, testified at a Senate hearing on Thursday that Cyber Command conducted the operations “to get ahead of foreign threats before they interfered or influenced our elections.” Nakasone appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee a week after the U.S. intelligence community issued a report describing foreign efforts to influence voter opinions. It found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered operations to hurt President Joe Biden’s candidacy and favor former President Donald Trump. Iran sought to hurt Trump’s candidacy, but China didn’t deploy influence efforts, according to the report. While there were foreign efforts aimed at affecting voter opinion, there were no attempts on “any technical aspect of the voting process,” the agencies found. Nakasone also said that two recently discovered cyber-attacks were “a clarion call” to take a fresh look at challenges facing the U.S. The first was December’s revelation that suspected Russian hackers compromised popular software from SolarWinds Corp. and breached about nine government agencies as well as 100 companies. And in March, Microsoft Corp. revealed that suspected Chinese hackers used vulnerabilities in its Exchange software for email and carried out an attack that experts say has tens of thousands of victims.

Full Article: U.S. Conducted More Than Two Dozen Pre-Election Cyber Operations – Bloomberg

National: After Trump tried to intervene in the 2020 vote, state Republicans are moving to take more control of elections | Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

State Republicans have taken steps this year that could give them more power to sway the certification of election results, efforts that voting advocates decried as a blatant attempt to circumvent the popular vote, as President Donald Trump tried to do after his defeat in November. Amid an avalanche of voting legislation proposed in dozens of states, the moves go beyond highly scrutinized proposals to tighten rules around how ballots are cast in the name of election security. Critics say some of the initiatives attempt to clear the way for partisan actors to take control of election administration, as Trump unsuccessfully urged Republicans to do in the fall. On Thursday, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) of Georgia signed the most far-reaching effort yet into law — a sweeping voting measure that undercuts the power of the secretary of state and local election boards. The new law removes the secretary of state from serving as chair of the State Board of Elections, giving the legislature the authority to appoint a majority of the members, and authorizes the state board to suspend local election officials. If these measures had been in place in 2020, critics say, the state board could have tried to interfere when the secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, certified Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the state and rejected Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen.

Full Article: After Trump tried to intervene in the 2020 vote, state Republicans are moving to take more control of elections – The Washington Post

National: Dominion sues Fox News for $1.6 billion | Elahe Izadi/The Washington Post

Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, alleging that the network purposefully aired false claims about the the company’s role in the 2020 presidential election in order to boost ratings. In the suit, filed in a Delaware court, Dominion argued that the Fox and several of its on-air personalities elevated conspiracy theories about the voting company rigging the 2020 election and allowed falsehoods by their guests to go unchecked, including a wild claim that the company’s machines were manufactured in “Venezuela to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chávez” and that Dominion’s algorithm manipulated votes so that then-President Trump would lose. “Fox engaged in this knowing and reckless propagation of these enormous falsehoods in order to profit off these lies,” reads the lawsuit. “Fox wanted to continue to protect its broadcast ratings, catering to an audience deeply loyal to President Trump.” … Dominion earlier filed election-related defamation lawsuits against Trump affiliated attorneys Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, as well as MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell. The lawsuit cites Fox’s own reporting in advance of Election Day that the mail-in vote would heavily favor Joe Biden, and that it was likely that the result wouldn’t be known for days. But Dominion lawyers argue that Fox News ratings went into “in a freefall” in the days after the election and that the network was losing Trump loyalists to more right-wing channels such as Newsmax.

Full Article: Dominion sues Fox News for $1.6 billion – The Washington Post

National: Republicans’ efforts to restrict mail-in voting in Georgia, Utah, and other states, could backfire | Brittany Gibson/Vox

State Republican lawmakers have introduced a historic number of bills this year to restrict voting rights, zeroing in on restricting mail-in voting. More than 250 bills have been introduced or carried over in 43 states, of which 125 are focused on absentee or mail-in voting. The effort to implement voter restrictions on one level seems odd. Republicans made gains in the House of Representatives, and outperformed polls in competitive Senate races, suggesting they aren’t having trouble winning elections under the current laws. On the other hand, “Trump still lost, control of the Senate still changed, and so there may be an element of reacting to that and ultimately believing that [if voting is] restricted it will affect their voters more than our voters,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. More Americans than ever before voted by mail in the 2020 general election, about 46 percent of all voters, according to the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. A large motivator behind this was to avoid the in-person contact of voting lines and Election Day polling places. Perhaps wanting to downplay the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and concerned about boosting Democratic turnout, Trump took issue with the expansion of the mail-in voting systems across the country on the campaign trail and online.

Full Article: Republicans’ efforts to restrict mail-in voting in Georgia, Utah, and other states, could backfire – Vox

National: Senate panel dukes it out over voting rights | Marty Johnson/The Hill

Lawmakers on the Senate Rules Committee clashed Wednesday over sweeping Democratic legislation on voting rights and campaign finance and redistricting reform. “This bill is essential to protecting every American’s right to vote, getting dark money out of our elections, as well as some very important anti-corruption reforms,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the panel’s chairwoman, said in her opening statement on the For the People Act. “It is about strengthening our democracy by returning it to the hands of its rightful owners: the American people.” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the ranking member on the panel, argued against the legislation, saying it would “force a single, partisan view of elections on more than 10,000 jurisdictions across the country.” Known also as H.R. 1 and S.1, the bill is a top priority for Democrats. It passed the House in the last session of Congress, but failed to gain any traction in the Republican-controlled Senate. Coming in at over 800 pages, S.1 is hefty, wide reaching and complex. Outside of the issues surrounding voting rights, it would create an independent nonpartisan redistricting commission in an attempt to get rid of partisan gerrymandering, restructure the makeup of the Federal Election Commission and work to give more transparency to campaign donations.

Full Article: Senate panel dukes it out over voting rights | TheHill

National: Former Trump adviser takes prominent role in voting battle | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press