National

It is perhaps a metaphor for the times that even the volunteer who checked you into the polls in November now has a legal defense committee. The Election Official Legal Defense Network, which made its public debut on Sept. 7, offers to represent more than just poll workers, of course. Formed to counter the waves of political pressure and public bullying that election workers have faced in the last year, the organization pledges free legal services to anyone involved in the voting process, from secretaries of state to local election officials and volunteers. The group already has received inquiries from several election officials, said David J. Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, which oversees the project. Without getting into details, Mr. Becker said their queries were “related to issues like harassment and intimidation.” The network is the creation of two powerhouses in Republican and Democratic legal circles, Benjamin L. Ginsberg and Bob Bauer. In a Washington Post opinion piece this month, the two — Mr. Ginsberg was a premier G.O.P. lawyer for 38 years and Mr. Bauer was both a Democratic Party lawyer and White House counsel in the Obama administration — wrote that such attacks on people “overseeing the counting and casting of ballots on an independent, nonpartisan basis are destructive to our democracy.”

Full Article: Harassed and Harangued, Poll Workers Now Have a New Form of Defense – The New York Times

National: ‘It’s spreading’: Phony election fraud conspiracies infect midterms | David Siders and Zach Montellaro/Politico

It started as one big, false claim — that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. But nearly a year later, the Big Lie is metastasizing, with Republicans throughout the country raising the specter of rigged elections in their own campaigns ahead of the midterms. The preemptive spin is everywhere. Last week it was Larry Elder in California, who — before getting trounced in the GOP’s failed effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom — posted a “Stop Fraud” page on his campaign website. Before that, at a rally in Virginia, state Sen. Amanda Chase introduced herself as a surrogate for gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin and told the crowd, “Because the Democrats like to cheat, you have to cast your vote before they do.” In Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the former state attorney general running to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, is already talking about filing lawsuits to “tighten up the election” — more than a year before votes are cast. And in Pennsylvania, former Rep. Lou Barletta, who is running for governor after losing a Senate race two years earlier, said he “had to consider” whether a Republican could ever win a race again in his state given the current administration of elections there. Trump may have started the election-truther movement. But what was once the province of an aggrieved former president has spread far beyond him, infecting elections at every level with vague, unspecified claims that future races are already rigged. It’s a fiction that’s poised to factor heavily in the midterm elections and in 2024 — providing Republican candidates with a rallying cry for the rank-and-file, and priming the electorate for future challenges to races the GOP may lose.

Full Article: ‘It’s spreading’: Phony election fraud conspiracies infect midterms – POLITICO

National: Democrats push to shield election workers from violent threats | John Kruzel/The Hill

Democrats on Capitol Hill are renewing calls for legislation that would stiffen criminal penalties against those who threaten election administrators after unprecedented harassment aimed at workers during last year’s presidential contest. More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers, including from the key battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are pushing the proposals, with some lawmakers warning that violence could erupt during upcoming elections without enhanced protections. “I hope that it does not come to that,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) of the prospect of violence against election workers. “But unless we do something about it, that’s the trendline. We saw what happened at the United States Capitol when no one took the proper steps to prevent that.” Nearly 1 in 6 local 2020 election workers received threats of violence, and almost 1 in 3 said they felt unsafe because of their job, according to an April survey by the Brennan Center for Justice. Some had their homes broken into, others fled with their families into hiding and some faced armed crowds outside their workplaces and homes. And now, more than 10 months after Election Day, threats persist.

Full Article: Democrats push to shield election workers from violent threats | TheHill

National: ‘Incredibly dangerous’: Trump is trying to get Big Lie promoters chosen to run the 2024 election | Daniel Dale/CNN

Swing state by swing state, former President Donald Trump is trying to get people who tried to overturn the 2020 election chosen to be in charge of the 2024 election. Trump’s Monday endorsement of state Rep. Mark Finchem for Arizona secretary of state is the latest in a series of announcements that has alarmed independent elections experts. Trump has now backed Republicans who supported his lies about the 2020 election for the job of top elections official in three crucial battlegrounds — Arizona, Michigan and Georgia — where the current elections chiefs opposed his efforts to reverse his 2020 defeat. If people who have sought to undermine the 2020 election are running things in 2024, when Trump might be a candidate again, experts and many Democrats fear that attempts to subvert the will of the voters stand a much greater chance of success. “It is incredibly dangerous to support people for office who do not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. It suggests that they might be willing to bend or break the rules when it comes to running elections and counting votes in the future,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science and co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine. “Someone who claims falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump lacks credibility and cannot be trusted to run a fair election.” Finchem, who has also promoted QAnon conspiracy theories, has been an especially aggressive promoter of the lies that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and rife with “rampant” fraud. Finchem attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and was photographed outside the US Capitol that day (he denies any involvement in the riot there). And nearly eight months after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, he continues to urge Arizona legislators to somehow overturn Biden’s victory in the state.

Full Article: ‘Incredibly dangerous’: Trump is trying to get Big Lie promoters chosen to run the 2024 election – CNNPolitics

National: Judge: Former EAC executive director Brian Newby violated law in voter form case | Roxana Hegeman/Associated Press

A former high-ranking election official violated federal law in 2016 when he granted requests by Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to modify the national voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship in those states, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon threw out the contested decisions made by Brian Newby, then-executive director of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency, after finding on Thursday that Newby failed to determine whether the proposed requirements were necessary to register to vote. The long-delayed ruling by Leon has little practical effect since a federal appeals court had earlier granted a preliminary injunction in the case, blocking the enforcement of the requirement. In a separate case, the Kansas law requiring documentary proof of citizenship was found unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene. Leon remanded the requests for the changes sought by Georgia and Alabama to the Election Assistance Commission to reconsider in a manner consistent with his ruling, should those state continue to seek the state-specific instructions to the form. A requirement that prospective voters provide documents — such as a birth certificate or U.S. passport — in order to register to vote has long been championed by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who led former President Donald Trump’s now-defunct voter fraud commission. Kobach was a leading source for Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally may have voted in the 2016 election.

Full Article: Judge: US election official violated law in voter form case

National: This is how embarrassing Trump’s ‘fraud’ claims have gotten | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

It’s been, let’s see, 318 days since the 2020 presidential election. During that time, there has been an unprecedented effort to elevate and prove claims that there were enough illegal votes cast in enough counties in enough states that it cost Donald Trump a victory. That effort has resulted in precisely nothing substantive, no proof of people stuffing ballot boxes or illegally voting thousands of times or of electronic voting machines being manipulated. In multiple states, there were audits and recounts that validated the outcome: Trump lost. But that is not the validation Trump seeks. Instead, he wants the world to believe that he didn’t lose — that, despite the lack of evidence, he was the true victor in November. Or, not that, really — he wants people to think that the debunked and irrelevant evidence actually does prove that case, in the manner of a guy who makes his career selling Bigfoot footage. This, however, is not going to actually change the results of the election, should anything be able to do so, because there is a big difference between convincing random people in “Trump 2024″ shirts that fraud occurred and convincing actual election officials that they missed something big. So there’s been a two-track approach, with Trump and his allies charging that states also messed up their actual election processes, either by inadvertently committing technical violations of voting rules or by changing the rules in the first place.

Full Article: This is how embarrassing Trump’s ‘fraud’ claims have gotten – The Washington Post

National: Some Republicans Fear Tighter Election Rules Could Boomerang on the Party | Dante Chinni/Wall Street Journal

Since the 2020 election, Republicans in state legislatures have been tightening rules around voting and ballot security, passing more than 100 pieces of legislation in 24 states. Now some Republicans in Michigan, where they are weighing tightening voter rules, are pausing their efforts—in part because they believe some election-law changes could hurt their own party at the ballot box. This summer state Rep. Ann Bollin, the Republican who chairs the Michigan House Elections and Ethics Committee, said there was “not support” to make the absentee voting process more difficult. Ms. Bollin, herself a former township clerk, cited concerns from county clerks, including Republicans from largely conservative areas, who said the bills could have negative impacts on voter participation among voters of all stripes, Republicans as well as Democrats. The move has set off a fight within the state GOP over whether the new rules are necessary and whether they could actually hurt Republicans in the state. Other proposals have also been shelved for now. Michigan Republicans aren’t alone in their concerns. Party officials in a handful of other states voiced disapproval over the new proposals and laws.

Full Article: Some Republicans Fear Tighter Election Rules Could Boomerang on the Party – WSJ

National: Senate Democrats Forge Agreement On New Voting Legislation | Claudia Grisales and Juana Summers/NPR

Senate Democrats have reached a deal on revised voting rights legislation, but a major roadblock remains in the evenly divided chamber with Republicans ready to halt the bill’s progress. The package is the latest attempt by Democrats to counteract Republican-led measures at the state level to restrict voting access and alter election administration. The new legislation, unveiled Tuesday morning by Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and several co-sponsors, builds off a framework proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who had opposed an earlier, sweeping measure from his party. Along with Manchin, the new bill’s co-sponsors are Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Jon Tester of Montana, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Alex Padilla of California, along with Maine independent Sen. Angus King. Republicans have been united in opposition to what they call a federal takeover of state election policy. With an evenly divided Senate, a GOP filibuster stands in Democrats’ way, and their effort would fall short of the 60 votes needed to move the measure forward.

Source: Senate Democrats Forge Agreement On New Voting Legislation : NPR

National: Senate Democrats near agreement on new voting rights legislation | Leigh Ann Caldwell and Teaganne Finn/NBC

Senate Democrats are close to an agreement on updated voting rights legislation that can get the support of all 50 Democratic-voting senators, three Democratic aides familiar with negotiations said. The For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act were introduced in Congress in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Since their introductions, both have been voted on along party lines. The member-level discussions are complete, a source said, but staff members are going through the text to fix technical issues. No further details have been shared. The legislation would require the votes of 60 senators, including 10 Republicans, and it’s unlikely that Democrats will get enough Republican supporters. The bill is part of congressional Democrats’ broader campaign to strengthen voting laws at the federal level to fight restrictive voting laws passed in Republican-led states, such as Texas and Georgia.

Full Article: Senate Democrats near agreement on new voting rights legislation

National: Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election could put future fair elections in jeopardy | Rob Kuznia, Bob Ortega and Casey Tolan/CNN

When the election office led by Lisa Deeley first came under attack from then-President Donald Trump last year, it was more than a month before Election Day. Deeley, the chair of Philadelphia’s three-member election commission and a Democrat, watched from home as Trump falsely claimed during the first 2020 presidential debate that poll watchers had already been turned away at early voting centers in Philadelphia. “Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” Trump said. Deeley’s cell phone immediately lit up with calls and text messages. “A lot of my family, my friends, got a little chuckle out of it, but I knew it wasn’t at all something to laugh about,” she told CNN. “It was just the beginning.” Trump’s efforts to subvert the election began well before Election Day, and have only gained momentum since, with Republicans passing laws to restrict voting or make it easier for partisans to interfere in more than a dozen states, including key battlegrounds. Most recently, in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed an election bill into law last week over the fierce objection of the state’s Democrats, who, in hopes of derailing similar restrictions proposed earlier this summer, had fled the state two times en masse.

Full Article: Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election could put future fair elections in jeopardy – CNNPolitics

National: A dangerous trend among GOP candidates shows the Trump threat is here to stay | Greg Sargent/The Washington Post

So is this really how it’s going to be? Are more and more Republican candidates across our great land going to treat it as a requirement that they cast any and all election losses as dubious or illegitimate by definition? We’re now seeing numerous examples of GOP candidates running for office who are doing something very close to this. Which suggests the legacy of Donald Trump could prove worse for the health of democracy than it first appeared. It isn’t just that Republicans will be expected to pledge fealty to the lost cause of the stolen 2020 election. It’s also that untold numbers of GOP candidates will see it as essential to the practice of Trumpist politics that they vow to actively subvert legitimate election losses by any means necessary. One high-profile GOP candidate now playing this ugly Trumpist game is Larry Elder, who is running in a recall election against California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. This week, Elder told reporters that “there might very well be shenanigans” in the vote counting, just like “in the 2020 election,” and vowed that his “voter integrity board” of lawyers will “file lawsuits.” “The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans,” Elder also told Fox News. “My fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here and recall.” It’s common for campaigns to prepare for post-election litigation. But Elder is going much further. He’s hinting at a concerted effort to steal the recall and linking that to the “big lie” that there were widespread problems in 2020. The goal is plainly to tap into the deep well of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering that Trump fed for years — and to undermine in advance faith in any outcome but a win.

Full Article: Opinion | A dangerous trend among GOP candidates shows the Trump threat is here to stay – The Washington Post

National: Lawmakers seek to protect election workers | Linda So and Jason Szep/Reuters

Democratic Congress members called for tougher legislation to address death threats against U.S. election administrators following a Reuters report that exposed a lack of arrests in response to a wave of intimidation targeting the workers since November’s presidential election. In a report published on Wednesday, Reuters identified more than 100 threats of death or violence made to election workers and officials, part of an unprecedented campaign of intimidation inspired by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The response from U.S. law enforcement has so far produced only four known arrests and no convictions. “This is a real problem, and it needs attention,” said Representative John Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat. “If they are under attack, our democracy is very much under attack.” In late June, Sarbanes was among a group of Democratic House members and senators who introduced the Preventing Election Subversion Act, which would make it a federal crime to intimidate, threaten, coerce, or harass an election worker. It would also seek to limit “arbitrary and unfounded removals of local election officials.” At about the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a task force to investigate threats against election workers.

Full Article: U.S. lawmakers seek to protect election workers after Reuters investigation | Reuters

National: Democrats, GOP Push Back Against Partisan Election Audits | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

Ten months after the 2020 presidential election, Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are following Arizona in pushing investigations rooted in the false claim that the election was stolen. Inspired by former President Donald Trump’s baseless accusation of widespread voter fraud, the inquiries are taking place in two states won by President Joe Biden. They come as the similarly partisan review wraps up in Arizona, where investigators chased conspiracy theories and accepted millions of dollars from Trump allies. State lawmakers, mostly Democrats but also some Republicans, and much of the election administration community have lambasted the Arizona effort in Maricopa County for jeopardizing the security and confidence of elections and for tampering with election equipment that top state election officials now say needs to be replaced. Many election officials and lawmakers from both parties fear a repeat in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. “I can’t be party to what I consider to be the destruction of democracy in the United States,” said Pennsylvania state Sen. Dan Laughlin, a moderate Republican who is running for governor, in an interview. “We ran a clean election in 2020, but there’s a lot of folks who don’t quite believe that because of the distrust that’s been sown. I don’t see it. I don’t see any massive fraud.” This puts Laughlin at odds with most of his caucus, though he claims the disagreement has not caused a lot of friction. Republican state Sen. Gene Yaw also has said he does not support the audit.

Full Article: Democrats, GOP Push Back Against Partisan Election Audits | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: Terrorized U.S. election workers get little help from law enforcement | Linda So and Jason Szep/Reuters

The death threats brought Staci McElyea to tears. The caller said that McElyea and other workers in the Nevada Secretary of State’s office were “going to f—— die.” She documented the threats and alerted police, who identified and interviewed the caller. But in the end, detectives said there was nothing they could do – that the man had committed no crime. The first call came at 8:07 a.m. on Jan. 7, hours after Congress certified Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential vote. The caller accused McElyea of “stealing” the election, echoing Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. “I hope you all go to jail for treason. I hope your children get molested. You’re all going to f—— die,” he told her. He called back three times over the next 15 minutes, each time telling her she was “going to die.” McElyea, 53, a former U.S. Marine, called the Nevada Capitol Patrol and sent the state police agency a transcript of the calls, according to emails Reuters obtained through a public-records request. An officer contacted the man – who police would later identify as Gjurgi Juncaj of Las Vegas – and reported back to McElyea that their inquiry “might have pissed him off even further,” the emails showed. A week later, state police concluded that Juncaj’s threats were not criminal, characterizing them as “protected” political speech, according to a summary of the case. Juncaj was never arrested or charged. Asked about the calls, Juncaj told Reuters he didn’t believe he had done anything wrong. “Like I explained to the police, I didn’t threaten anybody,” he said.

Full Article: Special Report: Terrorized U.S. election workers get little help from law enforcement | Reuters

National: More secure election machines won’t be ready until 2024 | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Election officials and technology companies are embarking on a multiyear process to improve the security and accessibility of voting machines. But they’re running smack into a cadre of GOP politicians sowing unfounded doubts about election security. The major election vendors are getting ready to produce new voting machines that meet a slate of upgraded security standards. But those machines won’t be ready until around 2024, they told the Election Assistance Commission during a hearing yesterday. The machines likely won’t be widely used by voters until the 2026 midterm elections or later. Yet there’s a sense of urgency to boost public confidence in elections. The delay could be damaging as some Trump supporters continue to spread baseless claims about election hacking in 2020 and push for partisan audits in states Donald Trump narrowly lost to President Biden in November. “It’s reasonable to wonder whether the slow pace of change at the EAC and in the vendor community are up to the task of combating a loss of public confidence in elections,” Edward Perez, global director of technology development at OSET Institute, a nonprofit election technology organization, told me. In February, the EAC approved the basic rules for the upgrades. It’s the 2.0 version of a document called the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), which, despite its name, is often incorporated into mandatory guidelines approved by states. Among other changes, the update requires the strongest form of encryption of voting data and technology that makes it easier to audit vote counts.

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: More secure election machines won’t be ready until 2024 – The Washington Post

National: UC Berkeley group to study future of mobile voting | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

With the acknowledgment that mobile voting is gradually becoming more common across U.S. elections, a think tank at the University of California, Berkeley announced Wednesday it’s assembling a group of cybersecurity experts and former election officials to study the controversial practice and develop guidelines for its future use. The working group will be based out of Berkeley’s Center for Security in Policy, which will spend the next 12 to 18 months analyzing historical uses of internet-connected voting — including in several recent election cycles — and the feasibility of new technical standards that could offer greater layers of trust and security. While ballot submission by email and fax is offered in 31 states to military and expat voters, thanks to a federal program for U.S. citizens living abroad, a handful of states and counties have in the last few years started experimenting with mobile apps and websites for broader use. Those pilot programs, many of which have been funded by private donations, have drawn numerous criticisms from members of the election-security community, who’ve argued an electronic ballot is fundamentally insecure. Third-party audits have also found software developed by mobile-voting vendors, like Voatz, to be riddled with bugs.

Full Article: UC Berkeley group to study future of mobile voting

National: How G.O.P. Election Reviews Created a New Security Threat | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Late one night in May, after surveillance cameras had inexplicably been turned off, three people entered the secure area of a warehouse in Mesa County, Colo., where crucial election equipment was stored. They copied hard drives and election-management software from voting machines, the authorities said, and then fled. The identity of one of the people dismayed state election officials: It was Tina Peters, the Republican county clerk responsible for overseeing Mesa County’s elections. How the incident came to public light was stranger still. Last month in South Dakota, Ms. Peters spoke at a disinformation-drenched gathering of people determined to show that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald J. Trump. And another of the presenters, a leading proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories, projected a portion of the Colorado software — a tool meant to be restricted to election officials only — onto a big screen for all the attendees to see. The security of American elections has been the focus of enormous concern and scrutiny for several years, first over possible interference or mischief-making by foreign adversaries like Russia or Iran, and later, as Mr. Trump stoked baseless fears of fraud in last year’s election, over possible domestic attempts to tamper with the democratic process. But as Republican state and county officials and their allies mount a relentless effort to discredit the result of the 2020 contest, the torrent of election falsehoods has led to unusual episodes like the one in Mesa County, as well as to a wave of G.O.P.-driven reviews of the vote count conducted by uncredentialed and partisan companies or people. Roughly half a dozen reviews are underway or completed, and more are being proposed. These reviews — carried out under the banner of making elections more secure, and misleadingly labeled audits to lend an air of official sanction — have given rise to their own new set of threats to the integrity of the voting machines, software and other equipment that make up the nation’s election infrastructure.

Full Article: How G.O.P. Election Reviews Created a New Security Threat – The New York Times

National: New Texas voting bill deepens growing disparities in how Americans can cast their ballots | Elise Viebeck/The Washington Post

Red and blue states are increasingly moving in opposite directions on how millions of Americans can cast their ballots, exacerbating a growing divide as Republicans in states across the country — most recently Texas — impose new voting restrictions, while Democrats in others expand access. The conflicting trends are widening the disparities in election policy in the wake of the 2020 election, with Republicans heeding former president Donald Trump’s calls to tighten rules and Democrats moving to make permanent many voting policies that helped turnout soar during the pandemic. At least 18 states this year enacted 30 laws restricting access to voting, according to an analysis as of mid-July by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. That includes 11 states — nine of which supported Trump in 2020 — that only imposed restrictions and seven other states that both restricted and expanded voting access. An additional 18 states — nearly all of which backed President Biden — enacted laws that solely expanded access, the analysis shows.

Full Article: New Texas voting bill deepens growing disparities in how Americans can cast their ballots – The Washington Post

National: State GOP leaders push new 2020 election reviews as Arizona report looms | Zach Montellaro/Politico

GOP legislative leaders in key battleground states are increasingly embracing 2020 election investigations that they once held at arm’s length, as Arizona Republicans await a long-delayed final report from their own conspiracy-tinged “audit.” Top Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have recently thrown their support behind new hunts for fraud or irregularities in the last election. Pennsylvania state Senate President Jake Corman sidelined a prominent Republican backbencher who had tried to lead an investigation and instead empowered a committee chair to launch one with his support. That effort is hiring vendors and scheduling hearings. There is no mechanism to actually overturn the certified results of the 2020 election. But what these investigations could do is fuel former President Donald Trump’s lies about the election or prompt new efforts to enact state voting restrictions. Corman — who has called for a 2020 election review since November — recently told a conservative radio host that he had spoken with Trump about the efforts, describing the former president as “comfortable where we’re heading.” It’s the next stage in GOP efforts to export the Republican election review in Arizona elsewhere, after state legislators from around the country made pilgrimages to Arizona to see the Republican state Senate’s process there. Though local Republican officials in Maricopa County, as well as Democrats in the state, have derided the Arizona “audit” as a conspiracy-tinged sham seeking to undermine the 2020 election results, GOP leaders in other states are now giving their blessing to similar investigations, offering significantly more heft than earlier pushes from rank-and-file legislators, including more public funding, more staff time and potentially more legal weight. “It’s disappointing, because part of the burden of leadership is killing bad ideas that might be popular with the base,” said former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, a Republican who has been sharply critical of the Arizona review and other efforts to discredit the 2020 election. “When they put their imprimatur on it, it’s a signal to everybody that they think that this is important.”

Full Article: State GOP leaders push new 2020 election reviews as Arizona report looms – POLITICO

National: After voters embraced mail ballots, GOP states tighten rules | Anthony Izaguirre and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

A monthslong campaign by the Republican Party, fueled in part by the false narrative of widespread fraud in last year’s presidential election, has led to a wave of new voting laws that will tighten access to the ballot for millions of Americans. The restrictions especially target voting methods that have been rising in popularity across the country, erecting hurdles to mail balloting and early voting that saw explosive growth during the pandemic. More than 40% of all voters last fall cast mail ballots, a record. Texas is the latest state to crack down, after the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill Tuesday taking aim at Democratic-leaning counties that have sought to expand access to the ballot. “Regardless of motives, these bills hurt voters,” said Isabel Longoria, the election administrator of Harris County, which includes Houston. “Voters are going to feel this the next time they go vote, and that’s what I’m most worried about.”

Full Article: After voters embraced mail ballots, GOP states tighten rules

National: Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections | Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon/ProPublica

One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?” When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges. The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.” Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.

Full Article: Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections — ProPublica

National: Misinformation on Facebook beats factual news when it comes to clicks, study finds | Elizabeth Dwoskin/The Washington Post

A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources. The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources, such as CNN or the World Health Organization. Ever since “fake news” on Facebook became a public concern following the 2016 presidential election, publishers who traffic in misinformation have been repeatedly shown to be able to gain major audiences on the platform. But the NYU study is one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure and isolate the misinformation effect across a wide group of publishers on Facebook, experts said, and its conclusions support the criticism that Facebook’s platform rewards publishers that put out misleading accounts. The study “helps add to the growing body of evidence that, despite a variety of mitigation efforts, misinformation has found a comfortable home — and an engaged audience — on Facebook,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who reviewed the study’s findings. In response, Facebook said that the report measured the number of people who engage with content, but that is not a measure of the number of people that actually view it (Facebook does not make the latter number, called impressions, publicly available to researchers).

Full Article: Misinformation on Facebook beats factual news when it comes to clicks, study finds – The Washington Post

National: Their work secured the election. It also paved the way for pro-Trump conspiracies. | Kevin Collier/NBC

Watching coverage of pro-Trump rioters storm the Capitol building Jan. 6, Matt Bernhard had to wonder: How much were he and his colleagues to blame? “We spent the last five years putting in all this work,” said Bernhard, an engineer at VotingWorks, a nonprofit election technology company, and an expert in election cybersecurity. “And somehow despite all that, there was the worst insurrection in the country since the Civil War because people don’t trust the outcome.” Like all cybersecurity research, election security relies heavily on the premise that to make any system better, you first need to draw attention to the ways people can hack it. Bernhard’s peers have done that with gusto since the beginning of the Trump administration. They’ve showed how, in the right isolated circumstances, a voter registration machine can be rewired to play the 90s computer game Doom, or how a child could hack a vulnerable website that was coded to look like Florida’s election night reporting site. While their research heavily contributed to security upgrades ahead of the contentious 2020 election — one that election officials jointly called “the most secure in American history” — it has proven to be a double-edged sword. Election cybersecurity researchers who spoke with NBC News say they worry it also provided ammunition to bad-faith actors who have sought to convince some Americans that the election was illegitimate. “We always knew we were walking a bit of a scary line when flagging vulnerabilities,” Maggie MacAlpine, an election security researcher, said. “We’re always battling the fact that the appearance of a hack can be as impactful on an election as an actual hack.”

Full Article: Trump conspiracies strain election cybersecurity experts

National: Experts warn of dangers from breach of voter system software | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Republican efforts questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential race have led to voting system breaches that election security experts say pose a heightened risk to future elections. Copies of the Dominion Voting Systems software used to manage elections — from designing ballots to configuring voting machines and tallying results — were distributed at an event this month in South Dakota organized by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an ally of former President Donald Trump who has made unsubstantiated claims about last year’s election. “It’s a game-changer in that the environment we have talked about existing now is a reality,” said Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration. “We told election officials, essentially, that you should assume this information is already out there. Now we know it is, and we don’t know what they are going to do with it.” The software copies came from voting equipment in Mesa County, Colorado, and Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump allies had sue unsuccessfully challenging the results from last fall.

Full Article: Experts warn of dangers from breach of voter system software

National: Partisan Republican vote ‘audits’ are making elections less safe, officials say | Josh Marcus/The Independent

Even though they’re often conducted under the nominal banner of election security, Republican efforts to scrutinize the 2020 election results have made elections less safe, according to cyber security experts. Earlier this month, copies of the widely used Dominion Voting Systems election software were shared with attendees at an election event organised by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter and booster of election conspiracy theories. It’s unclear how the software reached participants, but cyber experts told the Associated Press that now that the Dominion software, which is used in roughly 30 states, is out in public hands, it may make it easier for hackers and others bad actors to find vulnerabilities. “It’s a game-changer in that the environment we have talked about existing now is a reality,” Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration, told the AP. “We told election officials, essentially, that you should assume this information is already out there. Now we know it is, and we don’t know what they are going to do with it.”

Full Article: Partisan Republican vote ‘audits’ are making elections less safe, officials say | The Independent

National: As Washington Stews, State Legislatures Increasingly Shape American Politics | Michael Wines/The New York Times

With the release of the 2020 census last month, the drawing of legislative districts that could in large part determine control of Congress for the next decade heads to the nation’s state legislatures, the heart of Republican political power. Increasingly, state legislatures, especially in 30 Republican-controlled states, have seized an outsize role for themselves, pressing conservative agendas on voting, Covid-19 and the culture wars that are amplifying partisan splits and shaping policy well beyond their own borders. Indeed, for a party out of power in Washington, state legislatures have become enormous sources of leverage and influence. That is especially true for rural conservatives who largely control the legislatures in key states like Wisconsin, Texas and Georgia and could now lock in a strong Republican tilt in Congress and cement their own power for the next decade. The Texas Legislature’s pending approval of new restrictions on voting is but the latest example. “This is in many ways genuinely new, because of the breadth and scope of what’s happening,” said Donald F. Kettl, a scholar of state governance at the University of Texas at Austin. “But more fundamentally, the real point of the spear of Trumpism is appearing at the state and local level. State legislatures not only are keeping the flame alive, but nurturing and growing it.” He added that the aggressive role played by Republican legislatures had much further to run.

Full Article: As Washington Stews, State Legislatures Increasingly Shape American Politics – The New York Times

National: Report: Most federal election security money remains unspent | Roxanna Hegeman/Associated Press

Congress provided hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up the nation’s election system against cyberattacks and other threats, but roughly two-thirds of the money remained unspent just weeks before last year’s presidential election. A recently released federal report says the states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories had spent a little more than $255 million of $805 million in election security grants through Sept. 30 of last year, the latest figures available. States were given leeway on how and when to spend their shares because election concerns and potential vulnerabilities of voting systems vary widely across the country. Several election officials cited two main reasons for the slow pace of spending: More than half the money wasn’t allocated until the 2020 election was less than a year away, giving election officials and state lawmakers little time to make major spending decisions. And the coronavirus pandemic upended last year’s election planning, forcing officials to focus on safety at the polls and pivot to provide more early voting and mail-in balloting. “Security was still on everybody’s mind, but it took a back seat to just making sure that the election ran without it just having a total meltdown,” said Don Palmer, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which issued the report. A state-by-state snapshot the commission released last month shows that as of the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30, when early voting was already happening in the presidential election, the nation’s 50 states plus the District of Columbia and five territories had spent roughly 31% of the election security funding. The grant money came in two chunks since 2018 under the Help America Vote Act.

Full Article: Report: Most federal election security money remains unspent

National: Legal experts welcome sanctions of pro-Trump lawyers, say more needed | John Kruzel/The Hill