National

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the United States Embassy to Ivory Coast issued a statement calling on leaders in the West African nation to “show commitment to the democratic process and the rule of law.” It was the kind of boilerplate proclamation that US diplomats issue all the time regarding elections around the world, particularly those parts of it where democracy is not completely secure. But it was undermined somewhat by comments from the US President just hours earlier. In a news conference a few hours after midnight at the White House, Donald Trump had railed against his rival, Joe Biden, saying that “all voting must stop” and baselessly accusing the Democrats of fraud. He continued to hit these points on Twitter, leading the social media platform to label several of his posts as “disputed” or “misleading.” Chaotic debates and a ugly campaign had already marred the standing of the US democratic system overseas this year, but the sight of the American leader openly seeking to delegitimize the vote was still a shock for many. Trump’s comments were greeted with horror in many countries, and some glee in others, where critics of the US have long accused Washington of hypocrisy regarding democratic rights. Speaking Wednesday, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said the US faced a “very explosive situation” and a possible crisis, telling public broadcaster ZDF that “this election has not been decided … votes are still being counted (but) the battle over the legitimacy of the result, however it turns out, has begun.”

Full Article: US election: President Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud undermine US credibility overseas – CNN

National: Ongoing ballot counts put focus on USA’s disjointed voting system | Pat Beall USA Today

Heading into Wednesday’s marathon absentee ballot count, one of every 10 Wisconsin and North Carolina jurisdictions were scanning absentee ballots on equipment so old it is no longer manufactured. And Georgia was tabulating ballots on a new system marred when electronic poll books failed to check in voters in some counties. America’s aging election equipment didn’t appear to be a major, nationwide factor at the polls Tuesday. Nor did brand-new replacement equipment, which states like Georgia rolled out in a historic presidential contest. “For a system like a roller coaster built on wood with the expectation of high-speed cars driving on it, things went pretty good,” said Gregory Miller, co-founder and chief operating officer of the OSET Institute, an election technology research nonprofit. “Nobody got ejected.” Yet because there’s no way to publicly document election system problems nationwide, no one really knows how widespread election day machine failures were, or whether small stumbles were part of a bigger pattern. Issues at one or two precincts can be shrugged off as glitches even as similar problems might occur in other counties. Election officials – and voters – can be left in the dark.

Full Article: Ongoing ballot counts put focus on USA’s disjointed voting system

National: With His Path to Re-election Narrowing, Trump Turns to the Courts | Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

With his political path narrowing, President Trump turned to the courts and procedural maneuvers on Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to stave off defeat in the handful of states that will decide the outcome of the bitterly fought election. The president’s campaign intervened at the Supreme Court in a case challenging Pennsylvania’s plan to count ballots received for up to three days after Election Day. The campaign said it would also file suit in Michigan to halt the counting there while it pursues its demands for better access for the observers it sent to monitor elections boards for signs of malfeasance in tallying ballots, modeled on a similar suit it was pursuing in Nevada. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump’s team added Georgia to its list of legal targets, seeking a court order enforcing strict deadlines in Chatham County in the wake of allegations by a Republican poll observer that a small number of ineligible ballots might be counted in one location. In Wisconsin, which along with Michigan was called on Wednesday for his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president’s campaign announced it would request a recount. The moves signaled Mr. Trump’s determination to make good on his longstanding threats to carry out an aggressive post-Election Day campaign to upend any result not in his favor and pursue his baseless allegations that the outcome was rigged. But it was not clear how much effect any of his efforts would have. In Georgia, the suit is about 53 ballots, and another case in Pennsylvania is about fewer than 100.

Full Article: With His Path to Re-election Narrowing, Trump Turns to the Courts – The New York Times

National: USPS ballot problems unlikely to change election outcomes in contested states – Jacob Bogage and Christopher Ingraham/The Washington Post

The 300,000 ballots the U.S. Postal Service reported as untraceable are unlikely to affect the outcome of the presidential race in key swing states — even in a worst-case scenario where all are lost — according to a Washington Post analysis. On Tuesday, the U.S. Postal Service notified a federal judge in the District of Columbia that the affected ballots had been scanned in at processing plants across the country but had never received exit scans signifying they’d been delivered to vote counters. The tracking issues raised alarms for voters in the 28 states that will not accept votes that arrive after Election Day and drew the ire of U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who ordered the agency to conduct ballot sweeps at a dozen processing plants by early Tuesday afternoon. But the Postal Service ignored Sullivan’s deadline, saying it would stick to its own inspection timetable, which voting rights advocates worried was too late in the day for any found ballots to make it to election officials. Meanwhile, nearly 7 percent of the ballots in Postal Service sorting facilities on Tuesday were not processed on time for submission to election officials, according to data the agency filed Wednesday in federal court, missing by a significant margin the 97 percent success rate postal and voting experts say the mail service should achieve.

Full Article: USPS ballot problems unlikely to change election outcomes in contested states – The Washington Post

National: European election observers decry Trump’s ‘baseless allegations’ of voter fraud | Carol Morello/The Washington Post

A group of international election observers on Wednesday praised the U.S. vote as orderly but condemned President Trump’s “baseless allegations” of fraudulent ballot counts and his suggestion that the tally be stopped midstream, saying he had undermined public confidence in democratic institutions. “Nobody — no politician, no elected official, nobody — should limit the people’s right to vote,” said Michael Georg Link, a member of the German parliament who led the lawmakers sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to observe a U.S. election for the ninth time. “Coming after such a highly dynamic campaign, making sure that every vote is counted is a fundamental obligation of all branches of government. Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.” At the invitation of the State Department, the OSCE sent 100 observers to more than 30 states to watch the vote. The preliminary findings they released Wednesday will be followed by a more comprehensive report early next year from the election monitoring branch of the OSCE.

Full Article: European election observers decry Trump’s ‘baseless allegations’ of voter fraud – The Washington Post

National: ‘No bar’ to what election officials shared on Election Day, DHS says | Benjamin Freed/CyberScoop

As voting culminated Tuesday and vote-counting continued into Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security officials said that a virtual “situational awareness room” where federal, state and local officials shared intelligence about cyber activity and other potential disruptions with each other was largely successful as an information-sharing space on Election Day. Over the course of Tuesday, the room — operated by the federally funded Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center — saw participation from about 500 election and voter-protection officials, IT staff, vendors and representatives from social media companies and political parties. And while DHS officials repeatedly described the cyber activity observed on Election Day as “another Tuesday on the internet,” there was a flutter of activity inside the virtual war room. “The engagement was great,” a senior official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday night. “A lot of sharing around scanning, sharing of IPs, sharing of emails. That’s what we wanted. There’s no bar to what we share.”

Full Article: ‘No bar’ to what election officials shared on Election Day, DHS says

National: Military absentee ballots surging, swing states pledge to count them | Tara Copp/McClatchy

Thousands of military ballots were still arriving in the swing states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, which are critical to the outcome of the presidential election and will be counted well into next week, election officials said Wednesday. In Pennsylvania, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar told reporters Wednesday that the state would continue to accept military absentee ballots through Nov. 10. “We want to remind everyone, military and overseas ballots are not due until a week after Election Day,” Boockvar said. “We want to make sure that not only every civilian absentee mail-in valid voter is counted, but also that every man and woman, who are serving our country, that their votes are counted.” In Pennsylvania, almost 8,400 military absentee ballots were returned and counted in the 2016 presidential election. That number is likely to surge. Not only did thousands more Pennsylvania voters – both military and civilian – request absentee ballots in 2020 compared to 2016, but the numbers of ballots returned has already surpassed the 2016 turnout.

Full Article: Military absentee ballots surging, swing states pledge to count them | McClatchy Washington Bureau

National: Forget Hanging Chads. Copyright Laws Could be the Next Electoral Quagmire. | Isabella Farr and Olivia Reingold/Politico

If you used a mail-in ballot in Fulton County, Georgia this year, you may have noticed peculiar language at the top of the ballot: “Copyright © 2020 Dominion Voting Inc.” Dominion Voting is a private company that sells election technology. And this ballot design — which was created by Dominion and counted using the company’s proprietary equipment — is technically its intellectual property.Unusual as it may seem, this isn’t uncommon: Most voting technology used throughout the U.S. is covered by intellectual property law. That means the touch-screen you might have tapped on to vote could be patented. The software used to process your vote could be copyrighted. Before you even got to the voting booth, your ballot was likely designed on copyrighted software. And all of it could cause a nightmare after Nov. 3, according to election-security experts. “We’re going to wind up with a thousand court cases that cannot just be resolved by just going into the software and checking to see what happened, because it’s proprietary,” said Ben Ptashnik, the co-founder of the National Election Defense Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group that pushes Congress to reform election security.

Full Article: Forget Hanging Chads. Copyright Laws Could be the Next Electoral Quagmire. – POLITICO

National: Two decades after the ‘Brooks Brothers riot’, experts fear graver election threats | Adam Gabbatt/The Guardian

In late November 2000, hundreds of mostly middle-aged male protesters, dressed in off-the-peg suits and cautious ties, descended on the Miami-Dade polling headquarters in Florida. Shouting, jostling, and punching, they demanded that a recount of ballots for the presidential election be stopped. The protesters, many of whom were paid Republican operatives, succeeded. A recount of ballots in Florida was abandoned. What became known as the Brooks Brothers riot went down in infamy, and George W Bush became president after a supreme court decision. In 2020, fears are growing that the US could see an unwanted sequel to the Brooks Brothers debacle – but with more violent participants. After a year in which armed Donald Trump supporters have besieged state houses across the country and shot and killed Black Lives Matter protesters – and in which Trump has said he will only lose if the election is rigged – a 2020 reboot of the Brooks Brothers stunt could be dangerous. “Everything is far more amplified or exaggerated than it was 20 years ago,” said Joe Lowndes, professor of political science at the University of Oregon and co-author of Producers, Parasites, Patriots, a book about the changing role of race in rightwing politics. “In terms of party polarizations, in terms of the Republican shift to the far right and in terms of the Republican party’s open relationship with and courting of far-right groups. This puts us on entirely different grounds.”

Full Article: Two decades after the ‘Brooks Brothers riot’, experts fear graver election threats | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

Editorial: Trump wants the courts to stop the counting. He’s going to be disappointed. | Edward B. Foley/The Washington Post

President Trump can rail as much as he likes, but he can’t stop the counting of valid votes. And while he is threatening to race to the Supreme Court to overturn any result against him, that, too, is likely to be a losing play — even with the bolstered conservative majority. In his remarks early Wednesday morning, Trump seemed to suggest that the court might halt the counting of all ballots that remain untallied. That is sheer nonsense. The vast majority of uncounted ballots suffer from no legal infirmity whatsoever. Many arrived at their local election offices weeks ago, piling up waiting to be counted because of misguided state laws that did not permit the process to start until Election Day or, in the case of Michigan, the day before. The fact that local officials could not make it through the unprecedently large pile in a single day is no basis for discarding those ballots — or for disenfranchising the eligible voters who properly cast them. There is not one iota of possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court, or any court, would disqualify those ballots. These ballots are not the hanging chads of Bush v. Gore. That case involved something genuinely susceptible to judicial determination: whether it was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution for identically cast Florida ballots to be treated differently in a statewide recount depending on whether they were in Miami or Palm Beach. That’s not the situation now. The remaining uncalled states, where not even unofficial winners have been projected by the media, are not yet in a recount situation. Vast numbers of ballots have not yet been counted for the first time. Until that happens, it’s premature to imagine that this election, as in 2000, might be decided in court.

Full Article: Opinion | Trump wants the courts to stop the counting. He’s going to be disappointed. – The Washington Post

Voter Check-In Systems Slow Down Voting and Results Across U.S. | Kartikay Mehrotra and Margaret Newkirk/Bloomberg

The system voters use across the country to identify themselves at polling places may be yet another reason for delayed results on Election Day, after digital poll books failed at local voting jurisdictions in at least four states. Voters in parts of Georgia, Ohio and Texas all experienced various levels of system disruption with their ePollbooks provided by the vendor, KnowInk. In Nevada, voters in some Clark County precincts had to wait for their digital poll books to access their voter records before polls could open. DeKalb County in Georgia, population 760,000 and heavily Democratic, is allowing two polling places to stay open an additional 40 to 45 minutes because of “inability to operate the poll pads as designed, preventing voters from casting their ballots,” county Superior Court Judge Courtney L. Johnson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Franklin County, Ohio ditched their ePollbooks for paper records at 5:30 a.m. after election officials couldn’t determine why they were malfunctioning, said Ed Leonard, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, adding that the move to paper could slow tabulation of results in the Columbus region.

Full Article: Election News: Digital Poll Books Cause Voting and Results Delays in Some States – Bloomberg

As Counting Begins, a Flood of Mail Ballots Complicates Vote Tallies | Stephanie Saul and Danny Hakim/The New York Times

Voters returned nearly 64 million mail-in ballots before Election Day, a pandemic-driven record that is certain to make for a more complicated vote count this year but could also reshape American elections for years to come. Today, the counting begins. But there will be major differences among battleground states in how that plays out, and potential legal challenges — particularly from the Trump campaign — are likely to further complicate the process. Some battleground states, like North Carolina, have been processing ballots for weeks. Elections officials there expect at least 97 percent of votes to be counted on Tuesday night. But in one of the most hotly contested states, Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign and Republican allies blocked counties from processing votes ahead of the election. Mail-in balloting this year doubled from 2016, and for many voters, the shift has been a revelation.

Full Article: As Counting Begins, a Flood of Mail Ballots Complicates Vote Tallies – The New York Times

National: Election Day Issues Reported Across U.S. as Voters Find Broken Machines, Locked Doors, Absent Officials | Sophia Waterfield/CNN

Problems at polling stations such as technical issues with polling machines and absentee officials, including head precinct judges, are being reported across the U.S. on Election Day.Twitter user @PJeffC, who writes from the Bronx in New York, said that an election site didn’t have working scanners. “Disappointed with election site at CS 150 on Fox Street. After waiting in line since 5:30 AM and filling out ballots after they opened up tardy, we were informed that the scanners were not working. Very disorganized.” In Florida, News8 reporter Josh Navarro reports that a polling location in Grace Church in Rochester was having technical issues with voting machines. “An elections inspector on scene told me off-camera it has been two hours they are trying to troubleshoot it. No ETA when it’ll be back online.” In Buffalo, Erie County, New York, long lines were reported by news anchor Dave Greber. He said: “There was a power cord issues here when the polls opened at 6 am. The issue has been resolved, and all 314 precincts in @ErieCountyNY are open and operating.”

Full Article: Election Day Issues Reported Across U.S. as Voters Find Broken Machines, Locked Doors, Absent Officials

National: Crush of mail-in ballots slows count in key states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin still counting | Jeremy Herb and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Four key battleground states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia — began Wednesday with tens of thousands of absentee ballots uncounted, leaving the White House race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden up in the air. Election officials in some states called it a night and planned to resume the count in the morning, while some counties in Pennsylvania weren’t even to start tabulating their mail-in votes until later Wednesday morning. The mail-in ballots, which smashed records this year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, are expected to favor Biden, whose campaign encouraged Democrats to vote early, while in-person votes on Election Day may have given Trump an advantage. Trump and his allies have repeatedly called for results to be tallied quickly so that a winner could be declared on election night, though officials technically have days or weeks to complete official counts before state totals are certified. But in three key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — election officials were not allowed to begin processing absentee ballots until on or just before Election Day, after Republican-led state legislatures successfully opposed changing laws to allow earlier preparations like other states.

Full Article: Mail-in ballots: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin still counting – CNNPolitics

National: Voters battle lines, malfunctioning machines, misinformation at some polling sites | Erik Ortiz and Caroline Radnofsky/NBC

Long lines dominated polling sites across the country on Election Day, as some voters saw hiccups with election machines and infrastructure Tuesday morning, but no major reports of widespread problems for what is expected to be an historic turnout. Particular attention is being given to key battleground states, such as Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden are vying for votes in what is largely viewed as one of the most bitterly divisive presidential elections in recent memory and coming amid a backdrop of a raging pandemic that has killed more than 232,000 in the United States. “Thought we would be smart getting here early,” Becca McCormick, 35, said in a video as she waited on a line 100 people deep just before 7 a.m. in Roxborough, a Philadelphia neighborhood. “But turns out so did everyone else.” In the swing state of North Carolina, several polling places were reporting technical issues when polls opened at 6:30 a.m., including a site in the capital city of Raleigh. Voters in Franklin County, Ohio, and Spalding County, Georgia, were instructed to use paper ballots after technical glitches with machines. The issues in Spalding County were resolved later in the morning.

Full Article: Voters battle lines, malfunctioning machines, misinformation at some polling sites

National: Election Day voting sees some lines, scattered glitches and ample anxiety across the nation | Amy Gardner, Elise Viebeck and Michelle Ye Hee Lee/The Washington Post

Americans jittery about the integrity of U.S. elections and the risk of coronavirus infection contended with scattered equipment outages and sporadic crowds as they lined up for the election season’s final day of voting Tuesday. But as the polls began closing across the country, a portrait emerged of a far smoother Election Day than the nation had braced for amid a pandemic that upended how Americans cast ballots and a bitter presidential race that played out against a backdrop of social unrest and racial divisions. Nearly 102 million people had cast ballots in person or by mail before voting began on Election Day, a stunning figure that put the country on a path to the highest voter turnout in more than a century. On Tuesday, voting was largely brisk and steady, with election administrators and voters alike marveling at the relative ease with which the day unfolded after a spring and summer of chaotic primaries, Postal Service delays and multiple legal battles between Republicans and Democrats over how the election should be run.

Full Article: Election Day voting sees some lines, scattered glitches and ample anxiety across the nation – The Washington Post

National: An Expert on Voting Machines Explains How They Work | Sophie Bushwick/Scientific American

Serious political tensions and fears of COVID-19 have led record-breaking numbers of Americans to vote early this year, either by mail or in person. Now the process of counting these votes—whether in states that did so on a rolling basis as they came in or those that waited until Election Day—relies on machines that vary a great deal from state to state and even from county to county. Although the technology used in voting continues to evolve, it remains vulnerable to both malicious and unintentional errors. To protect the systems against both, explains Douglas W. Jones, a computer scientist at the University of Iowa and co-author of the book Broken Ballots, election officials need to be able to check and double-check the election’s results. “There’s a nice dictum that that [computer scientist and electronic-voting-security researcher] David Dill came up with at Stanford University: if we do it right, the Devil himself could build the voting machines, and we could hold an honest election,” Jones says. “And doing it right means having genuinely auditable technology—with ballots where the average voter knows that the marks they made on their ballot express their real intent.” Scientific American spoke with Jones about how voting machines work, their vulnerabilities, and what to expect on and after Election Day.

Full Article: An Expert on Voting Machines Explains How They Work – Scientific American

USPS disregards court order to conduct ballot sweeps in 12 postal districts after more than 300,000 ballots cannot be traced | acob Bogage and Christopher Ingraham/The Washington Post

Source: Judge orders USPS to conduct ballot sweep in 12 districts covering 15 states – The Washington Post

The U.S. Postal Service turned down a federal judge’s order late Tuesday afternoon to sweep mail processing facilities serving 15 states, saying instead it would stick to its own inspection schedule. The judge’s order came after the agency disclosed that more than 300,000 ballots nationwide could not be traced. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia had given the mail agency until 3:30 p.m. to conduct the “all clear” checks to ensure there would be enough time to get any found ballots to election officials before polls closed. His order affected 12 postal districts spanning 15 states. But in a filing sent to the court just before 5 p.m., Justice Department attorneys representing the Postal Service said the agency would not abide by the order to better accommodate inspector’s schedules. “This daily review process, however, occurs at different times every day,” DOJ attorney John Robinson wrote. “Specifically, on Election Night, it is scheduled to occur from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., a time period developed by Postal Service Management and the Postal Inspection Service in order to ensure that Inspectors are on site to ensure compliance at the critical period before the polls close. Given the time constraints set by this Court’s order, and the fact that Postal Inspectors operate on a nationwide basis, Defendants were unable to accelerate the daily review process to run from 12:30pm to 3:00pm without significantly disrupting preexisting activities on the day of the Election, something which Defendants did not understand the Court to invite or require.

National: Russian internet trolls are amplifying election fraud claims, researchers say | heera Frenkel/The New York Times

Social media accounts tied to a group of Russian trolls are amplifying claims of election fraud, according to researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of misinformation experts. “Assets linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) have been promoting unverified or false claims of massive ballot tampering, often with lurid, hyper-partisan headlines,” according to the report the coalition published Tuesday. The Russian agency was linked by federal officials to a wide-ranging disinformation campaign during the 2016 election. The false information being amplified was first shared by U.S. citizens, and Russian-linked trolls were sharing it across a number of fringe social media sites popular in right-wing circles, like Gab and Parler, the report said. The claims being made, including that ballots were being thrown away or shredded, have been widely debunked. Researchers at the Election Integrity Partnership tied I.R.A.-linked social media accounts to two websites, USA Really and The Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens. USA Really was launched by the Federal News Agency, a Russian outlet funded by the Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who also founded the I.R.A. The Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens, a Hungary-based outlet, was exposed in early October as a Russian asset. Both entities were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in December 2018 under the heading of “attempted election interference.”

Full Article: Russian internet trolls are amplifying election fraud claims, researchers say. – The New York Times

Michigan: Election robocall campaigns target Michigan, tell voters nationwide to ‘stay home’ | Tony Romm and Isaac Stanley-Becker/The Washington Post

Source: Election robocall campaigns target Michigan, tell voters nationwide to ‘stay home’ – The Washington Post

A wave of suspicious robocalls and texts bombarded voters as they began to cast their ballots on Tuesday, sparking fresh concerns about the extent to which malicious actors might harness Americans’ smartphones to scare people from the polls. Across the country, voters have received an estimated 10 million automated, spam calls in recent days telling them to “stay safe and stay home,” according to experts who track the telecom industry. In Michigan, meanwhile, government officials on Tuesday sounded early alarms about additional attempts to deceive the state’s voters, including one robocall campaign targeting the city of Flint that told people to vote tomorrow if they hoped to avoid long lines today. The origins of the each of the calls and texts remain unclear, reflecting the sophisticated tactics that robocallers typically deploy in order to reach Americans en masse across a wide array of devices and services. State election officials have scrambled to reassure voters in response, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pledging Tuesday to “work quickly to stamp out misinformation” — and federal officials indicating they are investigating the matter. The reach and timing of the “stay home” calls caught the attention of YouMail, a tech company that offers a robocall-blocking app for smartphones, as well as some of the country’s top telecom carriers, which determined from an investigation that the calls may be foreign in origin. Data prepared for The Washington Post by YouMail shows that the calls have reached 280 of the country’s 317 area codes since the campaign began in the summer.

Pennsylvania: Republicans seek to sideline mail-in ballots that voters were allowed to fix | PennLive.com

Inside the spacious exhibition center at the York Fairgrounds, dozens of county employees on Tuesday sorted through thousands of mail ballots in the lead-up to the close of polls. If they came across “naked ballots,” or ballots that lacked a secrecy envelope, they alerted the political parties. The parties could then contact voters, tell them there was a problem, and urge them to fix it. But in neighboring Dauphin and Lancaster Counties, voters who mailed in naked ballots, or made some other error, will never get the chance to fix them, because officials there believe the law does not allow them to do anything but reject ballots that contain mistakes. As Pennsylvania’s 67 counties began the painstaking process of processing and counting more than 2.5 million mail ballots, whether or not voters were given a chance to fix errors and ensure their votes were counted depended largely on where they lived. That inconsistency is now at the heart of an eleventh-hour lawsuit filed Tuesday by a group of Republican candidates and voters seeking for counties to set aside any ballots that voters were allowed to fix.

Full Article: Republicans seek to sideline Pa. mail-in ballots that voters were allowed to fix – pennlive.com

Wisconsin: Influx of absentee ballots means election results won’t come early | Local Government | Briana Reilly/The Cap Times

Four years ago, the Associated Press didn’t call a winner in the presidential contest in Wisconsin until well after midnight, a determination that led the news agency to declare Republican Donald Trump as the president-elect. This time, with more than 1.8 million absentee ballots cast and COVID-19 cases surging in this key battleground state, all bets are off as to when Wisconsin and broader U.S. will know whether Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden is victorious.Because so many are voting by absentee ballot this fall, election workers will face longer-than-normal processing times as they move to accurately count votes throughout the day Tuesday — work that, by state law, can’t start until 7 a.m., when polls open.Wisconsin is one of just four states that can’t begin processing ballots until Tuesday, according to a New York Times roundup. While there was some bipartisan support for changing that law or making other adjustments, nothing was enacted, making it unlikely that unofficial statewide results will be known here Tuesday. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe predicted observers will have to wait until Wednesday for an indication of the state’s unofficial election results. “It doesn’t mean something went wrong — it means election officials are doing their jobs and making sure every legitimate ballot gets counted,” she said in a statement Monday.

Full Article: Don’t wait up: Influx of absentee ballots means Wisconsin election results won’t come early | Local Government | madison.com

November Surprise: Fewer Ballots Rejected by Election Officials | Michael Wines/The New York Times

With absentee ballots flooding election offices nationwide, the officials processing them are tentatively reporting some surprising news: The share of ballots being rejected because of flawed signatures and other errors appears lower — sometimes much lower — than in the past. Should that trend hold, it could prove significant in an election in which the bulk of absentee voters has been Democratic, and Republicans have fought furiously, in court and on the stump, to discard mail ballots as fraudulent. In Fulton County, Ga., home to Atlanta, just 278 of the first 60,000-odd ballots processed had been held back. In Minneapolis, Hennepin County officials last week had rejected only 2,080 of 325,000 ballots — and sent replacement ballots to all of those voters. In Burlington, Iowa, the number of rejected ballots on Monday was 28 of 12,310. And of 474,000 absentee ballots received in Kentucky, barely 1,300 rejects remain uncorrected by voters, compared to more than 15,000 during the state’s presidential primary in June. The number of rejections could fall further. In those jurisdictions and many others, voters are notified of errors on ballots and can correct their mistakes, or vote in person instead. There is no shortage of caveats to those and other upbeat reports from state and local election officials, which are far from comprehensive. In some states, including battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, regulations prevent early processing of millions of mail ballots, and it is impossible to know how many will be turned down.

Full Article: Fewer Ballots Rejected by Election Officials This Election – The New York Times

National: Millions of Votes Are in Postal Workers’ Hands. Here Is Their Story. | Photographs by Philip Montgomery, Text by Vauhini Vara/The New York Times

On the eve of the election, more than 90 million voters have been sent absentee or mail ballots, and 60 million of them have already been returned. In Florida — a swing state with many aging residents, who are particularly vulnerable to Covid-19 — six million people requested mail ballots, and more than 4.6 million have sent them back. For postal workers there, shepherding the votes is the latest challenge in an already exhausting year. In the spring, as the coronavirus spread, letter carriers began hauling bulky deliveries of toilet paper and bottled water. Then came the quarantines. A worker’s husband or son would test positive, and she would be out of commission. This summer, under the newly installed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, the agency moved to curtail overtime and get rid of sorting equipment, desisting only after a public outcry and accusations of political motivation. Then the election onslaught arrived.

Full Article: Millions of Votes Are in Postal Workers’ Hands. Here Is Their Story. – The New York Times

National: As Voting Nears End, Battle Intensifies Over Which Ballots Will Count | Jim Rutenberg, Michael S. Schmidt, Nick Corasaniti and Peter Baker/The New York Times

With the election coming to a close, the Trump and Biden campaigns, voting rights organizations and conservative groups are raising money and dispatching armies of lawyers for what could become a state-by-state, county-by-county legal battle over which ballots will ultimately be counted. The deployments — involving hundreds of lawyers on both sides — go well beyond what has become normal since the disputed outcome in 2000, and are the result of the open efforts of President Trump and the Republicans to disqualify votes on technicalities and baseless charges of fraud at the end of a campaign in which the voting system has been severely tested by the coronavirus pandemic. In the most aggressive moves to knock out registered votes in modern memory, Republicans have already sought to nullify ballots before they are counted in several states that could tip the balance of the Electoral College. In an early test of one effort, a federal judge in Texas on Monday ruled against local Republicans who wanted to compel state officials to throw out more than 127,000 ballots cast at newly created drive-through polling places in the Houston area. The federal court ruling, which Republicans said they would appeal, came after a state court also ruled against them. In key counties in Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Republicans are seeking, with mixed results so far, to force election board offices to give their election observers more open access so they can more effectively challenge absentee ballots as they are processed, a tactic Republicans in North Carolina are seeking to adopt statewide.

Full Article: Which Ballots Will Count? The Battle Intensifies as Voting Ends – The New York Times

National: CISA’s political independence from Trump will be an Election Day asset | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

During four years in which government agencies have been increasingly manipulated to serve President Trump’s aims, the agency tasked with protecting the 2020 election against hacking has managed to steer clear of partisan politics. That straight and narrow path has allowed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to become a trusted hub of election security expertise for red and blue states, which have cooperated with CISA to fundamentally revamp their election cybersecurity protections during the past four years. The agency’s apolitical track record will also be vital on Election Day and afterwards, when CISA plans to run a virtual war room, delivering trusted information about election threats to thousands of state and local officials, political parties, social media companies and others, orchestrating the response to interference from Russia and elsewhere and tamping down unvetted rumors about interference that threaten to sow panic and distrust in the election results. “The folks at CISA continue to just play it straight and call it as they see it,” Suzanne Spaulding, who led a precursor of CISA called the National Protection and Programs Directorate during the Obama administration, told me.

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: CISA’s political independence from Trump will be an Election Day asset – The Washington Post

National: Lines, lawsuits and Covid: 5 big questions confront election officials before voting ends | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Election administrators have been scrambling to prepare for Tuesday ever since the coronavirus turned a series of primaries into disasters this spring. Now, all they can do is wait and see if their efforts pay off in the form of a smooth Election Day — and an uncontroversial vote count. Despite the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, voting in the 2020 general election has been remarkably smooth so far, according to eight election experts and administrators surveyed by POLITICO. A record number of Americans — more than 93 million so far, according to the U.S. Elections Project — have already cast ballots, facilitated by local governments and election officials making early and mail voting more accessible than ever. Some states, including Texas and Hawaii, surpassed total turnout from 2016 before Election Day. There have been hiccups and mistakes, including isolated problems with mail ballots and incidents of tension and disruption at early-voting centers. But now, the election is moving into its most unpredictable moment, with late lawsuits, security at polling places and the pandemic itself all among the factors that could test election infrastructure as millions more people vote.

Full Article: Lines, lawsuits and Covid: 5 big questions confront election officials before voting ends – POLITICO

National: One big flaw in how Americans run elections | Kim Zetter/Politico

In November 2016, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein sought recounts of the presidential election results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three states critical to Donald Trump’s upset victory. Stein had no evidence of fraud, but she cited Russian hackers’ targeting of the election, known security flaws in the states’ voting machines, a number of voting irregularities and discrepancies among the official tallies, historical voting patterns and polls that had predicted a Hillary Clinton win. Stein had the backing of more than 160,000 people who donated money to help her pay for the recounts, in what she described as an effort to gain certainty about the results for doubtful voters. They weren’t the only ones with questions about the election: Trump alleged that widespread voter had fraud occurred, without offering evidence, and some Democrats were urging Clinton to challenge her narrow losses in the Rust Belt states. But instantly, obstacles emerged to Stein’s efforts: The states charged steep filing fees, eventually totaling $2.3 million for Wisconsin and Michigan. Their recount laws were so confusing, especially in Pennsylvania, that Stein’s lawyers struggled with basic questions, such as in which court to file their petitions, and who could seek a recount. Pennsylvania’s law also had so many administrative hoops and barriers that Stein’s legal team dubbed it “anti-voter.” (“It gives you the illusion that candidates and voters can seek a recount, but in reality they couldn’t,” said Ilann Maazel, a partner in the New York law firm that led Stein’s recount efforts.)

Full Article: One big flaw in how Americans run elections – POLITICO

National: So Far, Trump’s “Army” of Poll Watchers Looks More Like a Small Platoon | Jessica Huseman/ProPublica

Donald Trump Jr. looked straight into a camera at the end of September as triumphant music rose in a crescendo. “The radical left are laying the groundwork to steal this election from my father,” he said. “We cannot let that happen. We need every able-bodied man and woman to join the army for Trump’s election security operation.” It was an echo of what his father, President Donald Trump, has said in both of his presidential campaigns. At a September campaign rally in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the president encouraged his audience to be poll watchers. “Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” he said. “Because this is important.” But the poll-watching army that the Trumps have tried to rally hasn’t materialized. Although there’s no official data, election officials across the country say that they have seen relatively few Republican poll watchers during early voting, and that at times Democratic poll watchers have outnumbered the GOP’s. In Colorado and Nevada, where the Trump campaign was particularly active in recruiting poll watchers, its efforts largely petered out.

Full Article: So Far, Trump’s “Army” of Poll Watchers Looks More Like a Small Platoon — ProPublica

National: Election security pros focus on effective partnerships | CyberScoop