National: Republicans want to change state election laws. Here’s how they’re doing it. | Zach Montellaro and Daniel Payne/Politico

Passing new election laws has been one of the top priorities for Republican state legislators in 2021 — and they are working from similar playbooks to tighten or restrict the old policies even in states with very different election systems. The latest flashpoint in the GOP drive to change voting rules came in Texas, where Democrats temporarily blocked a sweeping new bill this week that touched many of the same voting policies that drew wide notice in Georgia earlier this year. Republicans across the country have proposed significant changes to their states’ election rules after former President Donald Trump promoted conspiracy theories and spread false claims that he’d been robbed of victory there and elsewhere by massive fraud. Together, Texas and Georgia show which areas Republicans are focused on after Trump’s 2020 loss. Texas’ mail voting policies were already very tight, but both states sought to make their absentee policies stricter. Both states specifically targeted new voting policies piloted by big, blue counties in 2020. And Republicans in both states sought to impose new limits on election officials — and expose them to new criminal penalties for wrongdoing. Right now, there’s one key difference between the legislation in Georgia and Texas: Georgia’s became law, while Texas’ is stalled. But not for long: In an interview with Texas talk radio host Chad Hasty on Thursday, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said a special legislative session to pass a new elections law will come soon.

Full Article: Republicans want to change state election laws. Here’s how they’re doing it. – POLITICO

National: From Vermont to Kentucky, some Republicans expand voting access in 2021 | Julia Harte/Reuters

Vermont’s Republican governor on Monday signed a law requiring the state’s top election official to send a mail ballot to every eligible voter, becoming one of the few Republican leaders at the state level to buck their party’s trend of trying to limit voting access. The law signed by Governor Phil Scott makes permanent a universal mail-in voting system that Vermont adopted in 2020 to address the challenges to voting in person during the COVID-19 pandemic. It puts Vermont in the company of just six other U.S. states that automatically mail ballots to all eligible voters. Republicans have passed a wave of new voting requirements and limits this year in battleground states such as Georgia, Florida and Arizona, citing a need to stamp out alleged electoral fraud that former President Donald Trump says, without evidence, cost him the November election. Democrats and voting rights advocates have sued state officials over the measures and denounce them as partisan power grabs. State and federal judges have dismissed more than 50 lawsuits brought by Trump or his allies alleging fraud and other irregularities in November. But some Republicans lawmakers and election officials in states that are less competitive in national elections, such as Vermont, Kentucky and Oklahoma, say their party should be making it easier to vote, not harder – and support legislation to do just that.

Full Article: From Vermont to Kentucky, some Republicans expand voting access in 2021 | Reuters

National: Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims | Katie Benner/The New York Times

In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times. In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate. But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.

Full Article: Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims – The New York Times

National: Joe Manchin will oppose For the People Act, putting Senate’s voting rights bill in peril | Matthew Brown/USA Today

Sen. Joe Manchin, the pivotal Democrat in a split Senate, announced he will vote against Democrats’ flagship voting reform package, the For the People Act, in a major blow to the party’s ambitions on voting rights. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act. Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” Manchin wrote in an op-ed published Sunday in the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette-Mail. Manchin’s decision to oppose the legislation, which would allow the federal government greater ability to implement a standard election framework across the country and allow the federal government to enforce civil rights law, was rooted in his desire for bipartisanship and opposition to what he sees as a near-sighted partisan effort by Democrats. While the House passed the bill in March, the legislation has been bogged down in the Senate, where a 60-vote filibuster is necessary to advance legislation. Manchin has repeatedly said he will not vote to eliminate the filibuster, a Senate rule with a complicated history.

Full Article: Joe Manchin will vote against For the People Act

Editorial: Joe Manchin retreats to fantasyland and sticks America with the consequences | Eugene Robinson/The Washington Post

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has the right to live in a make-believe wonderland if he so chooses. But his party and his nation will pay a terrible price for his hallucinations about the nature of today’s Republican Party. And even this sacrifice might not guarantee that Manchin can hold on to support back home. Manchin’s declaration Sunday that he will vote against sweeping legislation to guarantee voting rights nationwide and that he “will not vote to weaken or eliminate” the Senate filibuster is a huge blow to President Biden’s hopes of enacting his ambitious agenda. There’s no way to spin this as anything other than awful. Manchin’s decision is a catastrophe not just for this particular bill, though he has almost certainly doomed the legislation. A senior administration official told me Monday that “none of this is a surprise to those who have heard Manchin’s views” and that the White House will continue working to “make progress notwithstanding the difficult challenges in front of us, including a 50-vote Senate.” But thanks to Manchin’s decision, Biden doesn’t even have a 50-vote Senate for what many Democrats see as an existential fight against the GOP’s attempt to gain and keep power through voter suppression. The 49 Senate votes left after Manchin’s defection will take Biden and the Democrats precisely nowhere. Worse, Manchin is asking Democrats to respond to ruthlessness with delusion. In an op-ed in the West Virginia paper the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said he will oppose the For the People Act, passed by the House in March, because it has no Republican support. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy,” he wrote.

Full Article: Opinion | Joe Manchin retreats to fantasyland and sticks America with the consequences – The Washington Post

Editorial: Are We Destined for a Crisis of Democracy in 2024? | Ross Douthat/The New York Times

I wrote my weekend column about three ways that Donald Trump might be prevented from plunging the country into crisis in 2024, should he reproduce both his 2020 defeat and his quest to overturn the outcome: first, through the dramatic electoral overhauls favored by progressives; second, through a Bidenist politics of normalcy that prevents the G.O.P. from capturing the House or Senate; or third, through the actions of Republican officials who keep their heads down and don’t break with Trump but, as in 2020, refuse to go along if he turns another loss into an attempted putsch. Because the big electoral overhauls aren’t happening, I noted, the progressive attitude risks becoming a counsel of despair. But that note didn’t adequately convey just how despairing a lot of progressives have become, treating the hypothetical where Trump (or, for that matter, some other Republican nominee) actually succeeds in overturning an election defeat not just as a possibility but as a likely outcome in 2024, the destination to which we’re probably headed absent some unexpected change. “This is where it’s going,” the press critic Jay Rosen of New York University tweeted recently, about a scenario in which state legislatures, the House and the Senate would simply hand the presidency to the G.O.P. nominee, “and there is presently nothing on the horizon that would stop it.” In response to my column, the Nation columnist and Substacker Jeet Heer suggested that none of the three approaches to forestalling a crisis seem plausible. “In sum, we can all see the disaster that is coming,” he wrote. “But there is no clear way to stop it.” This pessimism is, in a way, an extension of the arguments that went on throughout the Trump presidency, about how great a threat to democracy his authoritarian posturing really posed. As a voice on the less-alarmist side, I don’t think I was wrong about the practical limits on Trump’s power seeking: For all his postelection madness, he never came close to getting the institutional support, from the courts or Republican governors or, for that matter, Mitch McConnell, that he would have needed to even begin a process that could have overturned the result. Jan. 6 was a travesty and tragedy, but its deadly futility illustrated Trumpian weakness more than illiberal strength.

Full Article: Opinion | Are We Destined for a Crisis of Democracy in 2024? – The New York Times

National: Haberman: Trump pressing conservative media to write election was ‘stolen’ | Thomas Moore/The Hill

Former President Trump wants conservative media to legitimize his conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election being stolen and claims that he’ll soon be reinstated, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said Wednesday. “He has been trying to get conservative writers to publish, you know, in a more mainstream way that this election was, quote unquote, stolen from him,” Haberman told CNN “New Day” co-host John Berman, without naming any writers. She said Trump has been “laser focused” on the Arizona election audit and reaching out to other conservative politicians and commentators for support, hoping they’ll help promote the idea that the elections will be overturned. “And none of that is possible. But this is the kind of thing that he is trying to flush into the conservative media ecosystem,” Haberman said. “And I expect it to get more intense the more he is under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney and the state attorney general in New York and the threat of indictment over the coming months.”

Full Article: Haberman: Trump pressing conservative media to write election was ‘stolen’ | TheHill

National: Manchin pressed on filibuster, voting rights by Democrats | Sean Sullivan and Mike DeBonis/The Washington Post

Democratic leaders and activists are urgently stepping up pressure on Sen. Joe Manchin III to support legislation to fight Republican-led voting restrictions across the country, with party officials increasingly concluding that the battle over voting rights could come down to what the centrist Democrat from West Virginia does. In a rare show of public frustration with his own party on Tuesday, President Biden appeared to lash out at Manchin when he accused a pair of unnamed senators of aligning too closely with Republicans and stalling efforts to pass sweeping voting standards. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently announced that his chamber would vote this month on a House-passed elections bill co-sponsored by every Democratic senator except Manchin — a move that would force Manchin to pick a side in a fight that has taken on new urgency in recent weeks. Even some of Manchin’s Democratic colleagues are beginning to prod him more aggressively to join their cause, while activists and civil rights leaders are loudly decrying his hesitation. The Rev. Al Sharpton said Wednesday that he and other civil rights leaders plan to meet with Manchin next week to talk about the importance of supporting Democrats’ voting legislation. “The idea there is not to attack Manchin but to appeal to him,” said Sharpton. He said NAACP President Derrick Johnson and National Urban League President Marc Morial are also expected at the Tuesday meeting. The obstacle Manchin poses to his party’s voting rights effort is twofold: He is also one of several Democrats who oppose changing Senate rules to advance legislation with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority. While Manchin is not alone in his party in opposing the elimination of the filibuster, he has emerged as one of its most prominent defenders, which has made him a lightning rod for frustrated Democrats in the early months of Biden’s presidency.

Full Article: Manchin pressed on filibuster, voting rights by Democrats – The Washington Post

National: Microsoft’s Vote Tracking Software Clears a Major Hurdle | Lily Hay Newman/WIRED

In the ever-urgent quest to ensure United States elections are safe and secure, Microsoft’s ElectionGuard software has been a tantalizing development. The project, launched in 2019, offers what’s known as “end-to-end verifiability,” meaning that all vote data is encrypted and private, but there’s still full transparency into how the votes were tallied and whether the determination of a winner is correct. It’s open source and designed to be incorporated into existing voting systems. Last year, Microsoft successfully piloted the software in a real-world election. The question, though, has been whether private voting machine makers—who compete with each other in a regulated market—would be willing to adopt a technology that any of their rivals can use too. Now at least one company is saying yes. On Thursday, Microsoft and Hart InterCivic, one of the three major voting machine vendors in the US, jointly announced a partnership to pilot the use of ElectionGuard in Hart’s Verity voting systems. The idea is to meld Hart’s existing voting equipment with dramatically expanded software capabilities from ElectionGuard. The system will always produce paper backups, is encrypted in a special way to allow counting while preserving full voter security and privacy, and expands the ability to do post-election audits. Hart’s ElectionGuard offering will also give voters the ability to check whether their vote has been counted. And the system is independently verifiable—anyone will be able to build an app that can confirm the vote tally for a particular election. The news comes at a time of doubt and uncertainty among US voters. While election officials declared the 2020 election to be one of the most secure in the country’s history, the country still clearly bears scars left by former President Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine voter confidence in the election. In January, Pew found that more than three-quarters of Trump voters thought Trump had probably or definitely won the election—even though Joe Biden was the legitimate winner. There’s still a (controversial and much beleaguered) 2020 presidential election results audit dragging on in Arizona. And Republican lawmakers in numerous states have been pushing a wave of voting reform laws in recent months that critics say undermine citizens’ voting rights.

Full Article: Microsoft’s Vote Tracking Software Clears a Major Hurdle | WIRED

National: GOP Ballot Audits Aren’t About Overturning the Last Election. They’re About Overturning the Next One. | Elliot Hannon/Slate

If you needed any further evidence of the corrosive effect of Republicans’ performative election “audit” in Arizona, Pennsylvania Republicans now say they want one too. A group of Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers steeped in the election conspiracy claims of former President Donald Trump made a pilgrimage to Maricopa County on Wednesday to see for themselves how the partisan review of the 2020 results was going. The aim of the visit is exporting the Arizona model back to their home state, which President Joe Biden won by a point. The team of state legislators—Sens. Doug Mastriano and Cris Dush, and Rep. Rob Kauffman—met with Arizona officials before being briefed by the election conspiracy–spewing head of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm with no prior election experience that’s leading the audit. Cyber Ninjas has been given access to Maricopa County’s ballots and employed a team of contractors to scour for bamboo-laced “China ballots” that Trump supporters believe with all their hearts were imported ahead of Election Day to swing the vote to Joe Biden. The members of the Pennsylvania delegation in Arizona this week were among the 64 GOP legislators in the state that signed a letter asking the state’s congressional delegation to object to Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes going to Biden, the made-up procedural move that Trump supporters were demanding as they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. One of the Pennsylvania trio, Mastriano, was in Washington to protest the election result that day, but says he left before the Capitol was stormed.

Source: Republicans want to replicate Arizona’s election audit model elsewhere.

Trump has grown increasingly consumed with ballot audits as he pushes falsehood that election was stolen | Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman/The Washington Post

Former president Donald Trump remains relentlessly focused on the false claim that the November election was stolen from him and is increasingly consumed with the notion that ballot reviews pushed by his supporters around the country could prove that he won, according to people familiar with his comments. Trump has rebuffed calls from some advisers to drop the matter, instead fixating on an ongoing Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona and plotting how to secure election reviews in other states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Georgia, according to advisers. He is most animated by the efforts in Fulton County, Ga., and Maricopa County, Ariz., according to two advisers who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump’s interest has been fueled by conversations he has had with an array of figures who have publicly touted false claims of election fraud. Among them, according to advisers, is Christina Bobb, a host at the One America News network who has privately discussed the Arizona audit with the former president and his team; Mike Lindell, the chief executive of the company MyPillow; and Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R), who urged the state’s congressional delegation to reject Biden’s victory there last fall. Trump has become so fixated on the audits that he suggested recently to allies that their success could result in his return to the White House this year, according to people familiar with comments he has made. Some advisers said that such comments appear to be just offhand musings.

Full Article: Trump has grown increasingly consumed with ballot audits as he pushes falsehood that election was stolen – The Washington Post

National: First major voting vendor, Hart InterCivic, partners with Microsoft on ambitious software security tool ElectionGuard | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

The ElectionGuard technology that Microsoft touts as a way to make elections more secure and verifiable is taking its biggest step yet: Hart InterCivic, one of the big three election vendors, says it will incorporate ElectionGuard into one of its voting systems. The ElectionGuard open-source software development kit gives voters a unique code to track their encrypted vote and confirm it wasn’t manipulated, and it offers a way for third parties to validate election results, according to Microsoft. The two companies jointly announced the partnership on Thursday. Hart InterCivic is the biggest partner to date for ElectionGuard, as one of three vendors — alongside Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems — that dominate the marketplace for voting machine technology. “We believe we must constantly re-imagine how technology can make voting more secure and also more transparent, and this partnership with Microsoft is a strong step in that direction,” said Hart InterCivic CEO Julie Mathis. “The combination of Hart voting machines with ElectionGuard technology delivering end-to-end verifiability provides election officials the ability to offer more transparency to the process of vote tabulation.” Some details for how the pilot program will work remain unsettled, however. While Hart InterCivic will test ElectionGuard in its Verity system used by more than 500 jurisdictions in 17 states, Hart is still in the process of identifying at least one county to initiate the pilot, according to a Microsoft spokesperson. The timing for when the test would begin also hasn’t been locked down, either.

Full Article: First major voting vendor, Hart InterCivic, partners with Microsoft on ambitious software security tool ElectionGuard

National: A frantic warning from 100 leading experts: Our democracy is in grave danger | Greg Sargent/The Washington Post

With yet another GOP effort to restrict voting , President Biden is now calling on Congress to act in the face of the Republican “assault on democracy.” Importantly, Biden cast that attack as aimed at “Black and Brown Americans,” meriting federal legislation in response. That is a welcome escalation. But it remains unclear whether 50 Senate Democrats will ever prove willing to reform or end the filibuster, and more to the point, whether Biden will put real muscle behind that cause. If not, such protections will never, ever pass. Now, in a striking intervention, more than 100 scholars of democracy have signed a new public statement of principles that seeks to make the stakes unambiguously, jarringly clear: On the line is nothing less than the future of our democracy itself. “Our entire democracy is now at risk,” the scholars write in the statement, which I obtained before its release. “History will judge what we do at this moment.” And these scholars underscore the crucial point: Our democracy’s long-term viability might depend on whether Democrats reform or kill the filibuster to pass sweeping voting rights protections. “We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards,” the scholars write, in a reference to the voting rights protections enshrined in the For the People Act, which passed the House and is before the Senate. What’s striking is that the statement is signed by scholars who specialize in democratic breakdown, such as Pippa Norris, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. Other well-known names include Francis Fukuyama and Jacob Hacker.

Full Article: Opinion | A frantic warning from 100 leading experts: Our democracy is in grave danger – The Washington Post

National: Vice President Harris Asked to Lead on Voting Rights. She Has Her Work Cut Out for Her. | Katie Rogers and Nicholas Fandos/The New York Times

Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to her role with a list of demands. She wanted to be a generalist, in large part to learn the political rhythms of a president she was still getting to know. In the first few months of her tenure, some of her portfolio assignments were just that: assignments. But on the matter of protecting voting rights, an issue critically important to President Biden’s legacy, Ms. Harris took a rare step. In a meeting with the president over a month ago, she told him that she wanted to take the lead on the issue. Mr. Biden agreed, two people familiar with the discussions said, and his advisers decided to time the announcement of Ms. Harris’s new role to a speech he delivered on Tuesday in Tulsa, Okla. In his remarks, the president declared the efforts of Republican-led statehouses around the country to make it harder to vote as an “assault on our democracy, ” and said Ms. Harris could help lead the charge against them. He also gave a blunt assessment of the task: “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”

Source: VP Kamala Harris Asked to Lead on Voting Rights, and It’s a Challenge – The New York Times

Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to ‘handcuff’ democracy | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Conservative activists across America are pushing efforts to review the 2020 vote more than six months after the election, a move experts say is a dangerous attempt to continue to sow doubt about the results of the 2020 election that strikes at the heart of America’s democratic process. Encouraged by an ongoing haphazard review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona, activists are pushing to review votes or voting equipment in California, Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the powerful speaker of the state house of representatives recently hired ex-law enforcement officers, including one with a history of supporting Republicans, to spend the next three months investigating claims of fraud. At least one of the officers hired has a history of supporting GOP claims. The announcement also came after state officials announced they found just 27 cases of potential fraud in 2020 out of 3.3m votes cast. The reviews are not going to change the 2020 election results or find widespread fraud, which is exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, the conservative activists behind the effort – many of whom have little election experience – have championed the reviews as an attempt to assuage concerns the 2020 election was stolen. If the probes don’t turn up anything, they will only serve to increase confidence in elections, proponents say. But experts see something much more dangerous happening. Continuing to review elections, especially after a result has been finalized, will allow conspiracy theories to fester and undercut the authority of legitimately elected officials, they say. Once election results are certified by state officials, they have long been considered final and it is unprecedented to continue to probe results months after an official is sworn in. It’s an issue that gets at the heart of America’s electoral system – if Americans no longer have faith their officials are legitimately elected, they worry, the country is heading down an extremely dangerous path.

Full Afrticle: Push to review 2020 votes across US an effort to ‘handcuff’ democracy | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

National: As G.O.P. Blocks Inquiry, Questions on Jan. 6 Attack May Go Unanswered | Luke Broadwater/The New York Times

In blocking the formation of an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Republicans in Congress have all but closed off the possibility of a full and impartial accounting for one of the most serious assaults on American democracy in history, leaving unanswered critical questions with broad implications for politics, security and public trust. Fearing political damage from any sustained scrutiny of the attack, Republicans united in large numbers against the inquiry, moving to shift an unwelcome spotlight away from former President Donald J. Trump, his election lies that fueled the attack, and the complicity of many G.O.P. lawmakers in amplifying his false claims of widespread voter fraud. The result is that key details about a shocking act of domestic extremism against the United States government are likely to remain shrouded in mystery, and anything new that may be revealed about the assault at the Capitol will most likely be viewed through a partisan lens, with a substantial proportion of the country rejecting the reality of what transpired. The public may never know precisely what Mr. Trump and members of his administration did or said as a throng of his supporters stormed the Capitol while Congress met to formalize President Biden’s victory, threatening the lives of lawmakers and the vice president. The full story may never be revealed of why security officials were so unprepared for the breach of the building, supposedly one of the most secure in the nation, despite ample warnings of potential violence. The extent of the role of Republican lawmakers closely allied with Mr. Trump in planning the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that spiraled into a brutal onslaught may remain unexplored.

Full Article: Key Questions on Jan. 6 Capitol Attack May Go Unanswered – The New York Times

National: Defense for some Capitol rioters: election misinformation | David Klepper/Associated Press

Falsehoods about the election helped bring insurrectionists to the Capitol on Jan. 6, and now some who are facing criminal charges for their actions during the riot hope their gullibility might save them or at least engender some sympathy. Lawyers for at least three defendants charged in connection with the violent siege tell The Associated Press that they will blame election misinformation and conspiracy theories, much of it pushed by then-President Donald Trump, for misleading their clients. The attorneys say those who spread that misinformation bear as much responsibility for the violence as do those who participated in the actual breach of the Capitol. “I kind of sound like an idiot now saying it, but my faith was in him,” defendant Anthony Antonio said, speaking of Trump. Antonio said he wasn’t interested in politics before pandemic boredom led him to conservative cable news and right-wing social media. “I think they did a great job of convincing people.” After Joe Biden’s victory in last year’s presidential election, Trump and his allies repeatedly claimed that the race was stolen, even though the claims have been repeatedly debunked by officials from both parties, outside experts and courts in several states and Trump’s own attorney general. In many cases, the baseless claims about vote dumps, ballot fraud and corrupt election officials were amplified on social media, building Trump’s campaign to undermine faith in the election that began long before November. The tide of misinformation continues to spread, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote Wednesday in a decision denying the release of a man accused of threatening to kill U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The steady drumbeat that inspired defendant to take up arms has not faded away,” Berman wrote in her ruling ordering Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr. to remain in custody. “Six months later, the canard that the election was stolen is being repeated daily on major news outlets and from the corridors of power in state and federal government, not to mention in the near-daily fulminations of the former president.”

Full Article: Defense for some Capitol rioters: election misinformation

National: White male minority rule pervades politics across the US, research shows | Alexandra Villarreal/The Guardian

From county officials and sheriffs to governors and senators, white male minority rule pervades politics in the United States, according to a new report published on Wednesday. White men represent 30% of the population but 62% of officeholders, dominating both chambers of Congress, 42 state legislatures and statewide roles across the nation, the analysis shows. By contrast, women and people of color constitute 51% and 40% of the US population respectively, but just 31% and 13% of officeholders, according to the research by the Reflective Democracy Campaign, shared exclusively with the Guardian. “I think if we saw these numbers in another country, we would say there is something very wrong with that political system,” said Brenda Choresi Carter, the campaign’s director. “We would say, ‘how could that possibly be a democratic system with that kind of demographic mismatch?’” Two factors perpetuate white male control over virtually every lever of US government: the huge advantage enjoyed by incumbents, and the Republican party’s continued focus on mostly white male candidates.

Full Article: White male minority rule pervades politics across the US, research shows | US politics | The Guardian

National: The DNC Didn’t Get Hacked in 2020. Here’s Why. | Nicole Perlroth/The New York Times

As the country learns more about a broad Russian hijacking of American federal agencies and private companies and now another Russian hack, which was revealed on Thursday, it can look to the Democratic National Committee for a more positive development in the effort to prevent cyberattacks: Unlike four years ago, the committee did not get hacked in 2020. It’s worth remembering the D.N.C.’s outsized role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, when a spearphishing email roiled the Democratic Party in the final months of the campaign. That March, Russian hackers broke into the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, unlocking a decade’s worth of emails, before dribbling them out to the public with glee. The D.N.C. chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, resigned after emails appeared to show her favoring Mrs. Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. A simultaneous Russian hack of the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tainted congressional candidates with accusations of scandal in a dozen other races. By the time Donald J. Trump was in the White House in January 2017, “The D.N.C.’s house was ablaze,” Sam Cornale, the committee’s executive director, said in an interview this week. That month, Bob Lord, an unassuming, bespectacled chief security officer at Yahoo, was still mopping up the largest Russian hacks in history: a 2013 breach of more than three billion Yahoo accounts and a second breach in 2014 of 500 million Yahoo accounts. Mr. Lord, who discovered the breaches when he took over the job, helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation identify the assailants. A courtroom sketch of Karim Baratov, one of the hackers in the Yahoo case, still hangs on his wall.

Full Article: The D.N.C. Didn’t Get Hacked in 2020. Here’s Why. – The New York Times

National: What We Know About The Apparent Russian Hack Exploiting USAID | Bill Chappell, Dina Temple-Raston and Scott Detrow/NPR

The same Russian hackers who carried out the SolarWinds attack and other malicious campaigns have now attacked groups involved in international development, human rights and other issues, according to Microsoft. The company said the breach began with a takeover of an email marketing account used by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Hackers sent malicious emails from the agency’s account. Screenshots show the note purports to be a special alert, highlighting the message, “Donald Trump has published new documents on election fraud.” News of the attack comes less than three weeks before President Biden is slated to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House said this week that Biden wants to “restore predictability and stability” in the two countries’ relationship. Press secretary Jen Psaki issued that statement on Tuesday — the same day the hackers sharply escalated their attack, according to Microsoft. Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov denied his country is involved, saying Microsoft was making an “unfounded accusation,” according to the Interfax news agency.

Full Article: What We Know About The Apparent Russian Hack Exploiting USAID : NPR

National: Fourteen states have enacted 22 new laws making it harder to vote | Janie Boschma/CNN

State lawmakers have enacted nearly two dozen laws since the 2020 election that restrict ballot access, according to a new tally by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. These 22 laws in 14 states mark a new record for restrictive voting laws since 2011, when the Brennan Center recorded 19 laws enacted in 14 state legislatures. Most of the new laws make it harder to vote absentee and by mail, after a record number of Americans voted by mail in November. In addition to the new laws, the Brennan Center’s latest report identified 61 bills that were advancing through 18 state legislatures as of May 14. Advancing bills include those that have either passed at least one chamber or have otherwise made progress at the committee level. More than half of the 61 advancing bills would restrict absentee and mail-in voting. About a quarter include provisions that target voter ID requirements and voter roll purges. Not every bill that is advancing will pass, or even reach a vote, though state lawmakers are likely to act quickly to attempt to get their bills over the finish line. All but 12 state legislatures plan to adjourn by June 30, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Overall, since the election, the Brennan Center has identified at least 389 bills introduced in 48 states that include provisions that would restrict voting access. The only two states where lawmakers have not yet introduced a restrictive voting bill are Delaware and Vermont.

Full Article: Fourteen states have enacted 22 new laws making it harder to vote – CNNPolitics

Editorial: The GOP push to revisit 2020 – inspired by Trump’s ‘big lie’ – has worrisome implications for future elections | Dan Balz/The Washington Post

Donald Trump’s “big lie” has spawned a movement that under the guise of assuring election integrity threatens to do the opposite, potentially affecting the election process with questionable challenges that could block or delay the certification of results and undermine an essential pillar of democratic governance. Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 results has kept alive the fiction that the election was stolen or the process was deeply corrupted. That fiction — fueled by conspiracy theories — has encouraged members of his party, elected officials and ordinary citizens, to take steps to address this; these actions could lead to worse outcomes in the future. For some Americans, the 2020 election isn’t over, as unsubstantiated claims of fraud or widespread irregularities prompt continuing efforts to reexamine ballots and voting machines. Most noted has been the audit in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which has become a template for people who have bought into the former president’s false claims. The recount, ordered by the Republican-controlled state Senate and conducted by an outside company, resumed last week amid acrimony over how it is being carried out. It has been condemned in the strongest possible terms by, among others, the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which urged that it be shut down.

Full Article: The GOP push to revisit 2020 — inspired by Trump’s ‘big lie’ — has worrisome implications for future elections – The Washington Post

National: When it comes to ad hoc election investigations as in Arizona and Wisconsin, elevating doubt is the point | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

You are by now certainly familiar with the QAnon extremist ideology. It holds, in its more extreme iterations, that there is a secret group of prominent celebrities and Democratic politicians who engage in child abuse and cannibalism as part of their adherence to Satanism. It is, in short, as obviously extreme a conspiracy theory as can be imagined and one for which there is no evidence that doesn’t involve investigatory techniques such as picking every third letter off the back of a Cheerios box or interpreting a senator’s greeting of “hello” as being his attempt to say the word “hell.” Despite how extreme and obviously ludicrous the above formulation is, millions of Americans say they believe it. New polling from the Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core finds that 15 percent of Americans claim to believe specifically that a Satan-worshipping pedophile ring controls the world, with more than a fifth of Republicans somehow expressing that opinion. Perhaps those numbers are overstated, but that’s still a lot of people willing to publicly express confidence in one of the more demented ideas that’s ever emerged. So how do we combat the spread of this idea, one that’s already led to multiple acts of violence? Well, one way is to do our best to avoid treating it as in any way serious or legitimate or, ideally, to avoid giving it any oxygen at all. That is tricky for news organizations, for obvious reasons. Perhaps the worst way to combat what QAnon adherents say is to treat it as something falsifiable. That is, we wouldn’t want to simply assume it’s true or has obviously true components that we then work to validate or discredit. There’s no reason to believe it’s true, and even just launching an investigation suggesting that it might be lends it credence.

Full Article: When it comes to ad hoc election investigations as in Arizona and Wisconsin, elevating doubt is the point – The Washington Post

National: On Voting Rights, Biden Prefers to Negotiate. This Time, It Might Not Be Possible. | Katie Rogers/The New York Times

As President Biden confronts intense Republican opposition to the broad voting rights bill that Democrats have made a top priority this year, he might remember back to 1982 and an earlier partisan clash over the issue, one of a number across the years that shaped his views on deal making — and its limits. A key provision of the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting states from denying the vote to people on the basis of race, was facing a high-profile Senate debate over its extension. The Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel handling the legislation, was led by Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, but aware of the optics of having a former segregationist as their public face for negotiations, Republicans instead chose Senator Bob Dole of Kansas to lead them in talks about a deal. Representing the other side was Mr. Biden, then in his second term as a senator from Delaware. Mr. Biden was not as well known as another Democrat on the committee, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, but he did have one advantage: Republicans tended to listen to him. “He wanted to do the right thing, but he wanted to do it in a way that built consensus,” Sheila Bair, who served as a longtime counsel to Mr. Dole, said in an interview. “Biden recognized that if you want this to be lasting, we needed a big margin.”

Full Article: On Voting Rights, Biden Prefers to Negotiate. This Time, It Might Not Be Possible. – The New York Times

National: Democratic state legislators form voting rights council amid GOP push for restrictions | Tal Axelrod/The Hill

Democratic state legislators from across the country are forming a voting rights council as the party searches for ways to fight back against a wave of GOP-led states codifying restrictions to the ballot box. The council, which is being convened under the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), will “convene legislators to strategize about fighting GOP voter suppression — legislatively or judicially — and access national resources in the fight to preserve Americans’ political freedoms.” “Republicans’ embrace of voter suppression is an existential threat to the future of our democracy,” said DLCC President Jessica Post. “As we’ve seen before, Republicans are so terrified of being held accountable by the voters that they’ll stop at nothing to strengthen their grip on power. Our country was founded on the principle that Americans should have a say in how they’re governed, and state Democrats are ready to stand up and fight for the right to vote.” Nevada Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson and Michigan Senate Democratic Leader Jim Ananich will serve as co-chairs on the council. Members include North Carolina Senate Democratic Leader Dan Blue, Georgia House Democratic Leader James Beverly and Arizona House Democratic Leader Reginald Bolding, among others.

Full Article: Democratic state legislators form voting rights council amid GOP push for restrictions | TheHill

National: Cozy Bear revisits one of its greatest hits, researchers say: election skulduggery | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

It looks like the Russian government-linked hacking group Cozy Bear is back in the election trickery business. The security firm Volexity publicized a spearphishing campaign on Thursday that it identified only days ago, a scheme that uses an election fraud document as a lure. The emails purport to be from the the United States Agency for International Development, with targets including government agencies, research institutions and nongovernmental organizations in the U.S. and Europe. Volexity said it had concluded, with moderate confidence, that Cozy Bear — the group also known as APT29 or the Dukes — was behind the emails. If true, it would be a return to an old favorite subject for Cozy Bear, which the U.S. government and others implicated in the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, among other election interference efforts.

Full Article: Cozy Bear revisits one of its greatest hits, researchers say: election skulduggery

Wisconsin Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hires ex-cops to investigate November election | Patrick Marley/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is hiring retired police officers to investigate aspects of the November election, joining with Republicans from around the country who have questioned President Joe Biden’s victory. Vos, of Rochester, said he recognizes Biden narrowly won Wisconsin and is not trying to change the results with his taxpayer-funded investigation. He said he hopes the investigators can get to the bottom of issues Republicans have raised unsuccessfully in court, such as how the state’s largest cities used more than $6 million in grants from a private group to run their elections. Vos in a Wednesday interview said he was giving the investigators a broad mandate to spend about three months reviewing all tips and following up on the most credible ones. In addition to the grant spending, he said they may look into claims of double voting and review how clerks fixed absentee ballot credentials. “Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire? We just don’t know yet,” Vos said. Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who leads the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said she was worried the investigation would undermine confidence in an election that was conducted properly.

Full Article: Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos hires ex-cops to investigate election

National: It’s not just Arizona: Push to review 2020 ballots spreads | Kate Brumback and Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

Six months after Donald Trump’s loss, conspiracy theorists and Trump backers are continuing their push for repeated examinations of ballots and finding limited successes. A Georgia judge last week awarded a group the chance to review mail ballots in a large Georgia county that includes Atlanta. Officials in a rural Michigan county have expressed interest in a review of their voting machines. A similar debate has caused sharp divisions in a New Hampshire town. In some cases, the efforts have been inspired by an audit of the votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County, an elaborate exercise engineered by the GOP-led state Senate. The efforts are unlikely to yield any new revelations about President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The votes have been counted — and often recounted — and certified by local officials. Still, the lingering debate and legal wrangling have propelled suspicions and advanced debunked theories. And their sometimes misleading conclusions have been amplified by Trump, whose false allegations of election fraud sparked the push. The profusion of audits alarms election experts, who note that the Arizona audit has set a troubling new precedent of third-party, partisan review of the ballots, long after elections are over. “This is bad enough to see it happen once,” said Eddie Perez, an expert on voting systems at the OSET Institute, said of Arizona, but seeing it elsewhere in the country is “dangerous for democracy.’” The audits are serving a clear political purpose in firing up the Republican Party’s base. At a rally outside Phoenix last week featuring GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, references to the Arizona audit drew much more enthusiastic applause than even immigration, normally the top hot-button issue on the right in the border state.

Full Article: It’s not just Arizona: Push to review 2020 ballots spreads

National: They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Joe Biden’s election win are launching campaigns to become their states’ top election officials next year, alarming local officeholders and opponents who are warning about pro-Trump, “ends justify the means” candidates taking big roles in running the vote. The candidates include Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, a leader of the congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results; Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the top proponents of the conspiracy-tinged vote audit in Arizona’s largest county; Nevada’s Jim Marchant, who sued to have his 5-point congressional loss last year overturned; and Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who made dozens of appearances in conservative media to claim fraud in the election. Now, they are running for secretary of state in key battlegrounds that could decide control of Congress in 2022 — and who wins the White House in 2024. Their candidacies come with former President Donald Trump still fixated on spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, insisting he won and lying about widespread and systemic fraud. Each of their states has swung between the two parties over the last decade, though it is too early to tell how competitive their elections will be. The campaigns set up the possibility that politicians who have taken steps to undermine faith in the American democratic system could soon be the ones running it. “Someone who is running for an election administration position, whose focus is not the rule of law but instead ‘the ends justifies the means,’ that’s very dangerous in a democracy,” said Bill Gates, the Republican vice chair of the Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz. “This is someone who is trying to tear at the foundations of democracy.”

Full Article: They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. – POLITICO

National: Defending Elections from Cyberattacks: A New US Information Security Strategy | Pieter-jan Dockx/The Dispatch

In 2016, the US presidential election fell victim to Russian information warfare. In an effort to influence the outcome, Kremlin-backed hackers stole and leaked compromising documents from the Clinton campaign. This material was then spread on social media by Russian bots as part of a broader campaign to delegitimise the presidential candidate. Russian intelligence also breached digital election infrastructure to cast doubt on the integrity of the election process. More recently, during the 2020 presidential election, foreign adversaries again attempted disruption. However, as a result of a new election security strategy, these attacks only resulted in minor incidents. The first aspect of Washington’s four-pronged strategy focused on bolstering the election’s cyber defences. In 2016, state and local election authorities were faced with insufficient resources, leaving them with legacy voting equipment and outdated software vulnerable to attacks. Arguably, an even bigger issue was the lack of coordination between the various actors responsible for securing election infrastructure. With the responsibility scattered across the local, state, and federal levels, election officials were often ill-informed about the correct reporting authority. To address these concerns, the US Congress approved funding for election jurisdictions to upgrade their defences. The Department of Homeland Security also designated election infrastructure as critical infrastructure, unlocking additional funds and giving it the authority to enhance communication mechanisms. It further set up a centralised hub to gather and disseminate intelligence on cyber threats to the elections.

Full Article: Defending Elections from Cyberattacks: A New US Information Security Strategy – The Dispatch