National

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

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

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

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

Full Article: Why Are Republicans Promoting Cruel Election Restrictions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full Article: Think tank launches cybersecurity training for state officials

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

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

Full Article: NIST framework focuses on election cybersecurity — FCW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A GOP lawyer who advised former President Donald Trump on his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results is now playing a central role coordinating the Republican effort to tighten voting laws around the country. Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican lawyer and advocate for conservative causes, was among the Trump advisers on a January phone call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to declare him, and not Democrat Joe Biden, the winner of the battleground state. Now Mitchell has taken the helm of two separate efforts to push for tighter state voting laws and to fight Democratic efforts to expand access to the ballot at the federal level. She is also advising state lawmakers crafting the voting restriction proposals. And, she said Friday, she is in regular contact with Trump. “People are actually interested in getting involved and we have to harness all this energy,” Mitchell said in an interview. “There are a lot of groups that have projects on election integrity that never did before.” Mitchell’s new prominence tightens the ties between the former president, who has falsely insisted he lost the election due to fraud, and the GOP-led state voting overhaul that has helped turn a foundational principle of democracy into a partisan battleground. Trump’s false claims of fraud have fueled a wave of new voting restrictions. More than 250 proposed voting restrictions have been proposed this year by mostly Republican lawmakers, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. On Thursday, Georgia’s GOP governor signed into law a measure requiring voters to present ID to vote by mail, gives the GOP-controlled state legislature new powers over local elections boards and outlaws providing food or water to people waiting in line to vote. Biden on Friday condemned it as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

Full Article: Former Trump adviser takes prominent role in voting battle

National: Putin likely directed 2020 U.S. election meddling, U.S. intelligence finds | Christopher Bing, Joseph Menn and Raphael Satter/Reuters

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely directed efforts to try to swing the 2020 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump, according to an American intelligence report released on Tuesday that sources said would likely trigger U.S. sanctions on Moscow. The 15-page report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, added heft to longstanding allegations that some of Trump’s top lieutenants were playing into Moscow’s hands by amplifying claims made against then-candidate Joe Biden by Russian-linked Ukrainian figures in the run-up to the Nov. 3 election. It also added new findings that Putin either oversaw or at least approved of the election meddling to benefit Trump. Washington is expected to impose sanctions on Moscow as soon as next week because of the allegations, three sources said on condition of anonymity. The findings about Putin’s role are likely to receive particular attention given the report’s conclusions that Russia-backed figures such as Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach enlisted unnamed U.S. political figures in their campaign to smear Biden and his son Hunter. The report named Derkach, who met Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani in 2019, as someone whose movements were tracked, if not directed, by Putin. “Putin had purview over the activities of Andriy Derkach,” the report said. “Other senior officials also participated in Russia’s election influence efforts – including senior national security and intelligence officials who we assess would not act without receiving at least Putin’s tacit approval.”

Full Article: Putin likely directed 2020 U.S. election meddling, U.S. intelligence finds | Reuters

National: Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says | Julian E. Barnes/The New York Times

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday. The report did not name those people but seemed to refer to the work of Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who relentlessly pushed accusations of corruption about Mr. Biden and his family involving Ukraine. “Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions,” the report said. The declassified report represented the most comprehensive intelligence assessment of foreign efforts to influence the 2020 vote. Besides Russia, Iran and other countries also sought to sway the election, the report said. China considered its own efforts but ultimately concluded that they would fail and most likely backfire, intelligence officials concluded. A companion report by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments also rejected false accusations promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies in the weeks after the vote that Venezuela or other countries had defrauded the election.

Full Article: Putin Authorized Russian Interference in 2020 Election, Report Says – The New York Times

National: Foreign Meddling Flooded the 2020 Election—but Not by Hackers | Andy Greenberg/WIRED

After the pro-Trump hack-and-leak operations and disinformation campaigns that roiled the 2016 US election, the country braced for a second round of no-holds-barred foreign interference last year. But US intelligence agencies have now confirmed that didn’t entirely come to pass. The 2020 election was hit with meddling, trolling, and disinformation operations like those of 2016—but not the outright efforts to hack election infrastructure or political campaigns themselves. On Tuesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified report that outlines findings from US intelligence agencies including the CIA, NSA, FBI, and DHS on the overall picture of election interference by foreign actors in 2020. Those agencies agree that while more foreign powers than ever before attempted to influence the outcome of the election—using everything from disinformation to voter intimidation emails to social media campaigns—none actually seems to have used hackers to attempt to disrupt the election or access election infrastructure as they did in 2016. “In 2020, the IC tracked a broader array of foreign actors taking steps to influence US elections than in past election cycles,” the report reads, naming Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and even Lebanon’s Hizbollah Islamic extremist group as actors that sought to influence the election’s outcome. Russia in particular sought to support Trump’s reelection bid with everything from troll-farm social media postings to active smear operations that provided information directly to “Trump administration-linked persons.” Iran, meanwhile, worked against Trump’s reelection with social media campaigns and even fake, threatening emails designed to frame the Trump-supporting white nationalist group the Proud Boys—while not directly supporting Biden or any of Trump’s other political opponents.

Source: Foreign Meddling Flooded the 2020 Election—but Not by Hackers | WIRED

National: After 2020 loss, GOP targets voting restrictions | Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann/NBC

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try — to change how the contest is conducted. That’s the backdrop for all of the legislation across the country that would restrict voting access in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential loss back in November. Republicans hold legislative majorities and governorships in 24 states — including battlegrounds…

National: Spy Agencies Reject Trump Claim of China Election Meddling | Chris Strohm and Alyza Sebenius/Bloomberg

The U.S. intelligence community concluded with “high confidence” that China didn’t attempt to change the outcome of the 2020 election, an assessment that contradicts repeated assertions by former President Donald Trump and his allies. “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential Election,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in an unclassified report released on Tuesday. “China sought stability in its relationship with the United States” and “did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.” The agencies also found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered influence operations to hurt President Joe Biden’s candidacy, favoring Trump just as the intelligence community says he did in 2016 against then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.,” the report found. Russia has long denied meddling in U.S. elections.

Full Article: Spy Agencies Reject Trump Claim of China Election Meddling – Bloomberg

National: After Trump’s loss and false fraud claims, GOP eyes voter restrictions across nation | Nolan D. McCaskill/Politico

Former President Donald Trump’s debunked claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen election galvanized his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January. Now, his rhetoric is turning into policies that are moving through GOP-dominated state legislatures: a rollback of voting access. In statehouses around the country — most notably, in Georgia — lawmakers are rolling out legislation that would make it a lot harder to vote. They’re considering dozens of restrictive bills to purge voters from rolls, limit early and absentee voting, add voter ID requirements and eliminate automatic and same-day voter registration. In short, bills are being introduced to prevent something that didn’t happen in 2020 — widespread voter fraud — from recurring in 2022, 2024 and beyond. “They’re all predicated on the ‘big lie,’ the idea that Trump won the election, that there was widespread voter fraud,” said Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project. “The ‘big lie’ is the engine or the fuel that powered in a lot of ways the Jan. 6 insurrection. It’s also the fuel that’s powering these anti-voting bills that we are seeing across the country.” If passed, critics warn, the policies would disproportionately affect Democratic constituencies such as young voters, poor voters and voters of color, erecting barriers to the ballot box after a historic turnout last fall. “There’s absolutely no coincidence in terms of the people who are gonna be impacted and the timing of this,” said Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, an arm of the SPLC, which prioritizes impact litigation on issues such as voting rights and criminal justice reform.

Full Article: After Trump’s loss and false fraud claims, GOP eyes voter restrictions across nation – POLITICO

National: The Misinformation Campaign Was Distinctly One-Sided | Renée DiResta/The Atlantic

On the morning of September 21, 2020, three trays of United States mail were discovered in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The local sheriff’s office reported that the mail dump included several absentee ballots. When a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson made a similar assertion two days later, a local Fox affiliate, WLUK, reported the statement on its website. And then a national network of conservative commentators and influencers did something that happened again and again last fall: They picked up a bare-bones news story and made it sound nefarious. Within hours, Jim Hoft, the combative founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, a conservative media outlet, came across the story. A consortium of researchers working together on an effort called the Election Integrity Partnership (which included my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory) had by this point begun to track false and misleading voting-related information, particularly claims about ballot and mail fraud, as it moved across the social-media ecosystem. Our partnership began 100 days before the election and continued for a few weeks following Election Day. In that time, The Gateway Pundit would become a primary driver in dozens of instances in which false information or misleading narratives went viral. “We report the truth,” a banner on the site noted, as its pages regaled readers with stories of malfunctioning voting machines in Michigan, ballot boxes stuffed into cars, and “miraculous” fake ballots marked for Joe Biden. In our data set tracking the spread of misleading claims, The Gateway Pundit’s stories racked up more than 800,000 retweets on Twitter and at least 4 million views on YouTube over a four-month period. The process of producing viral misinformation hits followed a familiar pattern throughout the 2020 campaign: Prominent pro–Donald Trump influencers or hyper-partisan conservative outlets would pick up a real-world event—in many cases an isolated incident that bubbled into the national conversation via social media—and shoehorn it into a far broader narrative. Many of the narratives involved hints of conspiracy.

Full Article: Right-Wing Propagandists Were Doing Something Unique – The Atlantic

National: Senators introduce bill to fund election official cybersecurity training | Maggie Miller/The Hill

e: Senators introduce bill to fund election official cybersecurity training | TheHill

ArticlSenate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Wednesday reintroduced legislation to designate funding to provide cybersecurity training to election officials. The Invest in Our Democracy Act would establish a $1 million grant program to cover up to 75 percent of the costs of tuition for cybersecurity or election administration training for state and local election officials, along with their employees. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) would oversee the grant program, with EAC employees also eligible to receive funding for training. The bill was originally introduced in 2019 by Klobuchar and Collins but did not advance in the Senate. Klobuchar has been a key senator involved in spearheading election security legislation over the past several years, and before becoming chairwoman she served as the ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal elections and other related issues. “Our intelligence officials have made clear that our election systems continue to be a target for foreign adversaries,” Klobuchar said in a statement on Wednesday. “While federal and state officials have agreed that the 2020 election was ‘the most secure in American history,’ we must continue to do everything in our power to protect our democracy from the ongoing threat of foreign interference.”

National: As GOP makes it harder to vote, few Republicans dissent | Steve Peoples, Jonathan J. Cooper and Ben Nadler/Associated Press

In Arizona, a Republican state senator worried aloud that his party’s proposed voter identification requirements might be too “cumbersome.” But he voted for the bill anyway. In Iowa, the state’s Republican elections chief put out a carefully worded statement that didn’t say whether he backs his own party’s legislation making it more difficult to vote early. And in Georgia, Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan left the room as Senate Republicans approved a bill to block early voting for all but the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc. Duncan instead watched Monday’s proceedings from a television in his office to protest. This is what amounts to dissent as Republican lawmakers push a wave of legislation through statehouses across the nation to make voting more difficult. The bills are fueled by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and many are sponsored by his most loyal allies. But support for the effort is much broader than just Trump’s hard-right base, and objections from GOP policymakers are so quiet they can be easy to miss. “It’s appalling what’s happening,” said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who condemned the silence of the GOP’s elected officials. “There have been no provable, obvious, systemwide failures or fraud that would require the kind of ‘legislative remedies’ that Republican legislatures are embarking on. What the hell are you so afraid of? Black people voting?” Experts note that most changes up for debate would disproportionately affect voters of color, younger people and the poor — all groups that historically vote for Democrats. But Republicans are also pushing restrictions with the potential to place new burdens on GOP-leaning groups.

Source: As GOP makes it harder to vote, few Republicans dissent

National: Democrats rethink the U.S. voting system. What’s in the massive HR 1. | Jane C. Timm/NBC

House Democrats’ top legislative priority — the H.R. 1 For the People Act of 2021 — is 791 pages of big election changes. The legislation — a wish list of policies voting rights advocates have urged lawmakers to adopt for years — rethinks the entire voting process: how people register to vote, how ballots are cast and how states conduct elections. The goal is to improve access, particularly for voters of color. The bill would also create public financing systems for campaigns and ethics rules for candidates. “This is the next great civil rights bill,” said Elizabeth Hira, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, who helped craft the bill in her previous job with the House of Representatives. Voting rights advocates say the legislation could help prevent gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, said H.R. 1 would “thwart” nearly all of the more than 200 restrictive voting proposals her group has identified in 43 states.

Full Article: Democrats rethink the U.S. voting system. What’s in the massive H.R. 1.

National: The Latest Strategy Against Viral Election Misinformation: The Courtroom | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

Voting technology companies, like Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, are using billion-dollar defamation lawsuits to try to repair damage to their brands and bottom lines from conspiracy theories that alleged they were involved in stealing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden. Some see these legal fights as another way to take on viral misinformation, one that’s already starting to show some results. “This goes beyond hoping to stop the disinformation,” said attorney Steve Skarnulis. “The goal that we have is to hold people accountable.” Skarnulis represents Dominion employee Eric Coomer, who remains in hiding after being threatened and falsely accused of manipulating election results. Coomer filed the first defamation lawsuit related to the 2020 election. Skarnulis hopes that in addition to helping Coomer clear his name and return to a normal life, the suits will also serve as a warning. “I hope that it will shock media and other personalities who have the platforms they do, enough that they will be much more cautious about spreading disinformation.”

Full Article: The Latest Strategy Against Viral Election Misinformation: The Courtroom | Colorado Public Radio

National: How GOP-backed voting measures could create hurdles for tens of millions of voters | Amy Gardner, Kate Rabinowitz and Harry Stevens/Washington Post

The GOP’s national push to enact hundreds of new election restrictions could strain every available method of voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction, when Southern states curtailed the voting rights of formerly enslaved Black men, a Washington Post analysis has found. In 43 states across the country, Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 250 laws that would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee, according to data compiled as of Feb. 19 by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. Even more proposals have been introduced since then. Proponents say the provisions are necessary to shore up public confidence in the integrity of elections after the 2020 presidential contest, when then-President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud convinced millions of his supporters that the results were rigged against him. But in most cases, Republicans are proposing solutions in states where elections ran smoothly, including in many with results that Trump and his allies did not contest or allege to be tainted by fraud. The measures are likely to disproportionately affect those in cities and Black voters in particular, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic — laying bare, critics say, the GOP’s true intent: gaining electoral advantage.

Full Article: Voting laws proposed by Republicans in 43 states would limit voter access – Washington Post

National: Postal Service Delivered Vast Majority Of Mail Ballots On Time, Report Finds | Brian Naylor/NPR