National

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

Attorneys behind some of the dubious litigation over former President Trump’s 2020 election loss were sanctioned this week by a federal judge in a move that was welcomed by legal ethics experts. More disciplinary steps are needed to deter efforts to undermine future U.S. elections, said experts who spoke to The Hill, adding that the system for holding pro-Trump election lawyers to account was working as it should. “The wheels of ethical accountability grind slowly but deliberately,” said Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer. “Within the span of 10 months, we have seen both state bars and the courts take action against those lawyers who took their propagation of Trump’s conspiratorial fantasies out of the cable news studio and into the courtroom.” Following President Biden’s win at the ballot box, pro-Trump attorneys filed dozens of lawsuits based on unfounded claims contesting the election’s legitimacy. The litigation persisted even after the attorneys collectively racked up an abysmal record in court, winning only a single minor case while losing some 60 others. Although some Trump-allied attorneys characterized their actions as hard-fought advocacy, critics say they crossed an ethical red line by deploying politically motivated disinformation to advance Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen from him.

Full Article: Legal experts welcome sanctions of pro-Trump lawyers, say more needed | TheHill

National: Facing Foreign Election Foes, States Hire ‘Cyber Navigators’ | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

After more than a year of virtual meetings, Bill Ekblad showed up last week at eight southern Minnesota election offices to deliver a simple message to county election chiefs and information technology directors: You don’t need to face the massive cybersecurity threat alone. A Navy veteran who served 26 years as a cybersecurity strategist, Ekblad is Minnesota’s first cyber navigator, charged with helping local election offices defend against the ongoing menace from foreign foes. “Savvy adversaries are finding new ways to wreak havoc, and that could be leveraged in the election world,” he said from the road. “Counties don’t have to face these challenges by themselves.” If a phishing attempt targeted one county election official, it’s likely officials in one of the other 87 counties got a similar email, Ekblad said. Getting ahead of that threat by communicating with every election official around the state is essential, he added. Local election officials are on the front lines of election defense, but they often are underfunded or lack the technical knowhow to protect systems from cyber threats. Seeing this vulnerability, at least seven states—Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio—in recent years have launched cyber navigator programs that offer local election officials state-backed contacts to meet the challenge. Several other states are considering following suit. Mark Lindeman, an acting co-director of Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit, said cyber navigators are akin to personal trainers or financial advisers.

Full Article: Facing Foreign Election Foes, States Hire ‘Cyber Navigators’ | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: House passes bill bolstering landmark voting law | Brian Slodysko/Associated Press

House Democrats have passed legislation that would strengthen a landmark civil rights-era voting law weakened by the Supreme Court over the past decade, a step party leaders tout as progress in their quest to fight back against voting restrictions advanced in Republican-led states. The bill, which is part of a broader Democratic effort to enact a sweeping overhaul of elections, was approved on a 219-212 vote, with no Republican support. Its Tuesday passage was praised by President Joe Biden, who said it would protect a “sacred right” and called on the Senate to “send this important bill to my desk.” But the measure faces dim prospects in that chamber, where Democrats do not have enough votes to overcome opposition from Senate Republicans, who have rejected the bill as “unnecessary” and a Democratic “power grab.” That bottleneck puts Democrats right back where they started with a slim chance of enacting any voting legislation before the 2022 midterm elections, when some in the party fear new GOP laws will make it harder for many Americans to vote.

Full Article: House passes bill bolstering landmark voting law

National: U.S. Attorney General urges election officials to share threats | Linda So/Reuters

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland urged state and local election officials on Thursday to immediately provide the FBI any threatening communications they receive following a rise in threats against U.S. election administrators. “To help us help you, I urge that you preserve and immediately provide to the FBI any threatening communications you receive in any form,” Garland told a meeting of election officials that was also attended by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and senior Justice Department officials. In late June, the DOJ launched a task force with the FBI to investigate threats against election workers. “Our attention to this issue will not wane,” said Garland, according to a transcript of his remarks. “The Department is committed to investigating and prosecuting violations of federal law against election officials and election workers, and to supporting your safety and security.”

Full Article: U.S. Attorney General urges election officials to share threats | Reuters

National: How a Defunct Federal Provision Helped Pave the Way for New Voting Restrictions | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Georgia toughened identification requirements for absentee voting. Arizona authorized removing voters from the rolls if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years. Florida and Georgia cut back sharply the use of drop boxes for mail-in ballots. All of these new voting restrictions would have been rejected or at least softened if a federal civil rights protection from the 1960s were still intact, experts in election law said. For decades, the heart of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a practice known as preclearance, largely detailed under Section 5 of the statute. It forced states with a history of racial discrimination to seek approval from the Department of Justice before enacting new voting laws. Through preclearance, thousands of proposed voting changes were blocked by Justice Department lawyers in both Democratic and Republican administrations. In 2013, however, Section 5 was hollowed out by the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a majority opinion that racial discrimination in voting no longer constituted a significant threat. As Republican-led state legislatures have tightened voting rules after the 2020 election, new restrictions have been enacted or proposed in four states that are no longer required to seek approval before changing voting laws: Georgia, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Those new restrictions would almost certainly have been halted, stalled or altered had Section 5 still been in use, according to interviews with former federal prosecutors and a review by The New York Times of past civil rights actions by the Justice Department.

Full Article: How a Defunct Federal Provision Helped Pave the Way for New Voting Restrictions – The New York Times

National: States Are Making It Harder for Disabled People to Vote | Sarah Katz/The Atlantic

It’s long been difficult for Americans with disabilities to vote. Inaccessible paths are an obstacle to people who use wheelchairs. Long lines are a huge hurdle to people with chronic pain. Voting machines without audio or large-print ballots are an impediment to those who are blind or who have low vision. But last year, something different happened: As states passed pandemic-driven reforms to make voting easier for everyone, they inadvertently made voting a lot easier for most people with disabilities.And vote, they did. Nearly 62 percent of Americans with disabilities voted in 2020, a surge of nearly 6 percentage points over 2016, or 1.7 million more voters. The number of disabled voters reporting difficulties while voting also dropped significantly; in 2020, 11 percent of disabled voters reported having problems, down from 26 percent in 2012, according to an Election Assistance Commission report. That’s not to say voting was suddenly simple: Mail-in ballots aren’t easier for everyone, including those with visual or cognitive disabilities. And in 2020, disabled Americans were still roughly 7 percent less likely to vote than nondisabled Americans. But the changes made a real difference. Now state policy makers want to turn back the clock. Citing exaggerated concerns about voter fraud, state legislators have passed a wave of new bills that will make it harder for disabled people to vote in future elections. Overall, lawmakers have introduced more than 400 bills in 49 states this year that would restrict access to voting for people with disabilities. At least 18 states have already passed such laws. These laws either target mail-in ballots, reduce the amount of time voters have to request or mail in a ballot, restrict the availability of drop-off locations, impose stricter signature requirements for mail-in voting, or enact new and stricter voter-ID requirements.

Full Article: States Are Making It Harder for Disabled People to Vote – The Atlantic

Arizona: Election officials are tearing into the Maricopa County audit | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Election administrators from both parties are making their case that the audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Ariz., was partisan and ham-handed, even before it’s released. They’re hoping to halt the momentum for efforts at similar audits in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The report from the Maricopa County audit was supposed to be delivered to Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature yesterday. Parts of it were delayed, however, because three members of the five-person team leading the audit tested positive for the coronavirus and are “quite sick,” Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R) said. One of them is Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the firm conducting the audit and a vocal proponent of pro-Trump election conspiracy theories. It’s the latest in a string of delays for the audit, which was initially supposed to be completed in May, Rosalind S. Helderman reports. It was a shocking but not out-of-character turn for the audit. The controversial audit has been marked by cybersecurity bungles, a lack of adherence to basic auditing principles and myriad other self-inflicted wounds. “As a Republican and as an election administrator, I worry about our country and I worry about the future of my party,” Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state from Kentucky, said in a call with reporters. “I don’t want bad ideas like this spreading to other states.”

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Election officials are tearing into the Maricopa County audit – The Washington Post

National: Election officials call for audit guidelines after Trump-fueled surge | Yach Montellaro/Politico

The nation’s top election officials are calling for more stringent guidelines for post-election audits, as supporters of former President Donald Trump continue to relitigate his defeat in 2020. At the summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State, secretaries voted nearly unanimously on Monday to approve a series of recommendations for post-election audits on everything from a timeline, to chain of custody of election materials. The guidelines were shared first with POLITICO. During the vote, only two Republican secretaries present didn’t back it: West Virginia Secretary Mac Warner, who voted against it, and Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who abstained. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat who was part of a bipartisan group of 8 secretaries who helped draft the guidelines, told POLITICO after the vote that they had been working in secret for months to come to an agreement, comparing the pact the secretaries took to not speak about their work until it was completed to the movie “Fight Club.” The vote came at the tail end of the group’s four-day conference, the first time the organization has gathered in person since before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Full Article: Election officials call for audit guidelines after Trump-fueled surge – POLITICO

National: Election officials are pushing back against partisan audits launched by Trump allies | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

The battle lines are hardening between the vast majority of election officials who’ve spent months validating and defending the results of the 2020 election and former president Donald Trump’s supporters, who are still challenging those results without evidence and demanding new reviews. One such partisan and poorly run review started months ago in Maricopa County, Ariz., but it has not yet produced any results. Partisans are pushing other audits in Wisconsin and elsewhere. The coalition of top state election officials is pushing back by endorsing a how-to guide for post-election audits that criticizes reviews like Arizona’s that are run on a partisan basis and by private companies without ample experience in the field. Election officials fear the drumbeat of baseless allegations about election hacking and fraud from Trump allies will dampen faith in future election results and maybe in the democratic process itself. Ironically, the assault comes after a four-year election security surge that made 2020 by far the most secure against hacking in decades. “I’m terribly distressed about what this has done to the public’s perception of elections,” Ann S. Jacobs (D), chair of the state Elections Commission in Wisconsin, told me. “It erodes the faith of the electorate in their elected leaders. It justifies violence and threats of violence against election workers. America has always prided itself on its orderly transition of power and these fake accusations are undermining that.”

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Election officials are pushing back against partisan audits launched by Trump allies – The Washington Post

National: Election Officials Still Face Death Threats And Conspiracies | Miles Parks/NPR

It’s been more than nine months since Election Day 2020, but as the nation’s top election officials met in Iowa over the weekend, it was clear the shadow of that race will stretch far into the future of American democracy. The conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from former President Donald Trump has upended almost all aspects of election administration: Local officials who a decade ago would have gone about their bureaucratic business in relative anonymity are facing threats and intense pressure, and a large chunk of American voters have no confidence the system is fair. “This is the very unfortunate new normal,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, who had dozens of armed protesters visit her home in December after last year’s election. Elections are run in the U.S. at the state and local levels, so the top voting officials across the country are usually secretaries of state. They met this weekend in Des Moines for their first in-person gathering since January 2020.

Full Article: Election Officials Still Face Death Threats And Conspiracies : NPR

National: House Democrats Introduce John Lewis Voting Rights Legislation | Nicholas Fandos/The New York Times

Democrats on Tuesday unveiled a long-awaited linchpin of their drive to protect voting rights, introducing legislation that would make it easier for the federal government to block state election rules found to be discriminatory to nonwhite voters. House leaders expect to pass the bill, named the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act after the late civil rights icon, during a rare August session next week. They say it would restore the full force of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after a pair of adverse Supreme Court rulings and that it would help combat a wave of restrictive new election laws in Republican-led states. “Today, old battles have become new again as we face the most pernicious assault on the right to vote in generations,” said Representative Terri Sewell, the bill’s chief author and a Democrat from Alabama’s civil rights belt, where Mr. Lewis and others staged a national campaign for voting rights in the 1960s. “It’s clear: federal oversight is urgently needed.” But like other voting rights legislation to come before Congress this year, its chances of passing the evenly divided Senate are exceedingly narrow. Only one Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, is likely to support the legislation, leaving Democrats far short of the 60 votes they would need to break a Republican filibuster and send the bill to President Biden’s desk. Senate Republicans already blocked Democrats’ other marquee voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which would establish national mandates for early and mail-in voting and end gerrymandering of congressional districts. And while Democratic leaders in the Senate have vowed more votes on the matter in September, unless all 50 Democrats unite in a long-shot bid to change Senate filibuster rules, they are headed for an identical outcome.

Full Article: House Democrats Introduce John Lewis Voting Rights Legislation – The New York Times

National: As Democrats Renew Voting Rights Push, Offsetting Roberts Court Is Top of Mind | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

When Judge John G. Roberts Jr. faced the Senate for his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in September 2005, critics sounded the alarm about his longstanding skepticism toward the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which many view as crucial to the political gains of Black Americans over the last half century. “I fear that if Judge Roberts is confirmed to be chief justice of the United States, the Supreme Court would no longer hear the people’s cries for justice,” Representative John Lewis, the civil rights leader from Georgia, said in urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the nomination. Judge Roberts was easily confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate despite pleas from Mr. Lewis and other civil rights activists. He went on to oversee the court in rulings that weakened the Voting Right Acts, compromising its decades-long role as a protector of minority access to the ballot box across much of the South. Mr. Lewis died last July, just months before Republican state legislatures enacted an onslaught of voting restrictions after the 2020 elections. But it is not only those legislatures that Democrats see as their adversaries on election issues. “We are also up against a Supreme Court that is keen on destroying our nation’s most consequential voting rights law,” Representative Terry A. Sewell, Democrat of Alabama, said this week during a Democratic call celebrating the anniversary of women’s right to vote.

Full Article: As Democrats Renew Voting Rights Push, Offsetting Roberts Court Is Top of Mind – The New York Times

National: How Eric Coomer Became the ‘Perfect Villain’ for Voting Conspiracists | Susan Dominus/The New York Times

It was already late on Nov. 9 when Eric Coomer, then the director of product strategy and security for Dominion Voting Systems, left his temporary office on Daley Plaza in Chicago and headed back to the hotel where he’d been staying for the previous few weeks. Both the plaza and the hotel had the eerie post-apocalyptic feel of urban life during the pandemic, compounding the sense of disorientation and apprehension he felt as he made his way up to his room. Earlier that evening, a colleague sent him a link to a video of Coomer speaking at a conference with a menacing comment below it. “Hi Eric! We know what you did,” the commenter wrote. That link eventually led Coomer to a second video, which he watched in his hotel room. What he saw, he quickly realized, was something that was likely to wreck his life, hurt his employer and possibly erode trust in the electoral process. Over the past decade, Coomer, 51, has helped make Dominion one of the largest providers of voting machines and software in the United States. He was a gifted programmer, known to be serious about his work but informal about almost everything else — prone to profanities, with a sense of humor that could have blunt force. Coomer, who traveled around the world for competitive endurance bike races, would have blended in on the campus of Google, just one in a crowd of nonconformist tech types. In the more corporate business of elections, he stood out for the full-sleeve tattoos on his arms (one of Francis Bacon’s “Screaming Popes,” some Picasso bulls) and the half-inch holes in his ears where he once wore what are known as plugs.

Full Article: How Eric Coomer Became the ‘Perfect Villain’ for Voting Conspiracists – The New York Times

Experts: False claims on voting machines obscure real flaws | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

The aftermath of the 2020 election put an intense spotlight on voting machines as supporters of former President Donald Trump claimed victory was stolen from him. While the theories were unproven — and many outlandish and blatantly false — election security experts say there are real concerns that need to be addressed. In Georgia, for example, election security expert J. Alex Halderman says he’s identified “multiple severe security flaws” in the state’s touchscreen voting machines, according to a sworn declaration in a court case. Halderman told The Associated Press in a phone interview that while he’s seen no evidence the vulnerabilities were exploited to change the outcome of the 2020 election, “there remain serious risks that policymakers and the public need to be aware of” that should be addressed immediately to protect future elections. Trump loyalists — pushing the slogan “Stop the Steal” — held rallies, posted on social media and filed lawsuits in key states, often with false claims about Dominion Voting Systems voting machines. Almost all of the legal challenges casting doubt on the outcome of the election have been dismissed or withdrawn and many claims of fraud debunked. State and federal election officials have said there’s no evidence of widespread fraud. And Dominion has fought back forcefully, filing defamation lawsuits against high-profile Trump allies. As an election security researcher, it’s been frustrating to watch the proliferation of misinformation, said Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University. For years, he said, concerns raised by election security experts were dismissed as unimportant. “All of a sudden, people are going the other way, saying the existence of a flaw not only is something that should be fixed, it means the election was actually stolen,” he said. “That’s not true either.”

Full Article: Experts: False claims on voting machines obscure real flaws

‘We are in harm’s way’: Election officials fear for their personal safety amid torrent of false claims about voting | Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

Full Article: ‘We are in harm’s way’: Election officials fear for their personal safety amid torrent of false claims about voting – The Washington Post

In preparation for a vote on local tax assessments last week in Houghton County, Mich., county clerk Jennifer Kelly took extraordinary precautions, asking election staff in this remote northern Michigan community to record the serial numbers of voting machines, document the unbroken seals on tabulators and note in writing that no one had tampered with the equipment. In the southeastern part of the state, Michael Siegrist, clerk of Canton Township, followed similar steps, even organizing public seminars to explain how ballots are counted. Despite their efforts, they said they could not fend off an ongoing torrent of false claims and suspicions about voting procedures that have ballooned since President Donald Trump began his relentless attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election last year. “People still complained about our Dominion voting machines, about the need for more audits, and most of all they complained about the use of Sharpies,” Siegrist said, referring to the widely used pen, which has become the focus of a conspiracy theory gripping Trump supporters in Arizona and other states.

National: Election officials face complex challenges looking to 2022 | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

State election officials say they are confronting a myriad of challenges heading into the 2022 midterm elections, from threats of foreign interference and ransomware to changes of election laws and concerns of physical safety — all while still dealing with a wave of misinformation and disinformation surrounding last year’s presidential election. The nation’s secretaries of state have been meeting with the goal of building relationships across states, sharing best practices and hearing from experts. The long list of challenges, outlined in various panel discussions over their association’s four-day conference, might seem daunting but election officials said preparations have already begun. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican. “For us to be able to get together and talk with one another, compare notes, even commiserate on a human level a little bit about some of the drama over the last year and a half is a good experience. It’s a useful thing, and we learn a lot from each other.” Heading into the 2020 presidential election, the focus for election officials was shoring up cybersecurity around the nation’s voting systems after Russia four years earlier had probed for vulnerabilities and, in a small number of cases, breached voter registration systems. Then the pandemic happened, and state election officials had to scramble to ensure they could handle an onslaught of mail ballots from voters wary of crowded polling places while also dealing with shortages of poll workers and other staff triggered by the coronavirus.

Full Article: Election officials face complex challenges looking to 2022

National: New intel reports indicate fresh efforts by Russia to interfere in 2022 election | Katie Bo Williams, Natasha Bertrand and Alex Marquardt/CNN

The Biden administration is receiving regular intelligence reports indicating Russian efforts to interfere in US elections are evolving and ongoing, current and former officials say, and in fact, never stopped, despite President Joe Biden’s warnings to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the summer and a new round of sanctions imposed in the spring. Biden made deliberate mention of Russia’s operations two weeks ago when he revealed in public remarks to the intelligence community that that he had received fresh intelligence about “what Russia’s doing already about the 2022 election and misinformation” in his daily intelligence briefing that day. “It’s a pure violation of our sovereignty,” Biden said at the time. One of the people familiar with the matter confirmed that there have been recent intelligence reports about what the Russians are up to, particularly their efforts to sow disinformation on social media and weaponize US media outlets for propaganda purposes. There are some indications that Moscow is now attempting to capitalize on the debate raging inside the US over vaccines and masking, other sources told CNN.

Full Article: New intel reports indicate fresh efforts by Russia to interfere in 2022 election – CNNPolitics

National: Senate Democrats unveil bill to protect election officials, prevent election subversion | Celine Castronuovo/The Hill