National

The false narrative of a stolen election that inspired hundreds of Americans to storm the U.S. Capitol in 2021 is now fueling a far more sophisticated movement, one that involves local and state election boards across the country. What was once the Stop the Steal movement is now the “voter integrity” movement. Its aim is to persuade the people who are responsible for certifying local elections of the false notions that widespread fraud is a threat to democracy and that they have the authority and legal duty to do something about it: Deny certification of their local elections. Read Article

National: Election officials fight a tsunami of voting conspiracy theories | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Voting machines reversing votes. More voters registered than people eligible. Large numbers of noncitizens voting. With less than two weeks before Election Day, a resurgence in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting is forcing state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors and explaining how elections are run at the same time they’re overseeing early voting and preparing for Nov. 5. “Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” says Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.” Read Article

National: Intelligence officials warn foreign disinformation from Russia may flood post-election period | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The U.S. intelligence community is anticipating a potentially tumultuous post-election period this year, where foreign governments will seek to amplify domestic unrest to cast doubt about the legitimacy of the winner while undermining confidence in democracy. Officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence singled out Russia, using some of their strongest language to date to warn that leaders in Moscow are preparing a full-court press in the final weeks of the election and beyond. “The intelligence community is increasingly confident that Russian actors are considering — and in some cases implementing — a broad range of influence efforts timed to the election,” an ODNI official told reporters Tuesday. Read Article

National: American creating deep fakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show | /Catherine BeltonThe Washington Post

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video. Read Article

National: Election experts worry about Republican poll watchers in swing states | Helen Coster, Alexandra Ulmer and Tim Reid/Reuters

Be aggressive,” Jim Womack, a local Republican Party chair in North Carolina, told the grid of faces who joined the Zoom training session for volunteers to monitor voting on Nov. 5. “The more assertive and aggressive you are in watching and reporting, the better the quality of the election.” During the two-hour session, conducted from a Republican Party office featuring a placard of an AR-15 rifle and photos of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Womack, 69, an army veteran and a retired information systems engineer, instructed 40 volunteers on how to spot “nefarious activity.” He mentioned a local clergyman who accompanied dozens of Latino parishioners to a voting site “like a shepherd leading a sheep.” Voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States – despite Trump’s false claim, supported by a majority of Republicans in Congress, that the 2020 election was stolen. US election experts worry about Republican poll watchers in swing statRead Article

‘People are scared’: Election workers brace for threats | Mike Wendling/BBC

A survey earlier this year by the Brennan Center found 38% of local election officials had experienced threats, harassment or abuse. More than half were concerned about the safety of their colleagues or staff, a level of anxiety that has remained more or less constant since the 2022 midterm elections. “People are scared,” says Melissa Kono, the elected town clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin. Ms Kono travels around Wisconsin delivering state-mandated election training to volunteer poll workers. She says the kinds of scenarios she’s being asked about have changed dramatically over the last five years, to the point where she’s increasingly included material in her sessions about dealing with threats. “I’m concerned for the clerks and the election workers,” she said. Read Article

National: What Trump keeps getting wrong about ‘paper ballots’ | Marshall Cohen/CNN

Trump’s insistence that the US switch to “paper ballots” is nonsensical. More than 98% of voters live in jurisdictions that produce fully auditable paper trails, according to data from Verified Voting, which tracks election equipment in every county. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group, has spent the past two decades urging counties to move away from paperless voting in favor of in-person polling sites. (Vote-by-mail obviously incorporates a paper trail.) The people who run the group say they have accomplished their goal – despite claims from Trump and others that the US still needs paper ballots. “It’s really weird and I don’t understand it,” said Mark Lindeman, the group’s director for policy and strategy. “Almost everybody votes on paper ballots. Anyone who is convinced that we need paper ballots is very likely voting on paper ballots themselves.” Read Article

National: Republicans face backlash for lawsuits targeting overseas and military voting | Amy Gardner, Jacqueline Alemany and Dan Lamothe/The Washington Post

Republican lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina challenging the legitimacy of overseas ballots have prompted a backlash among military personnel, their spouses, veterans and elected officials. Scores of veterans and active-duty members of the armed forces have posted online or contacted their elected representatives out of concern that their votes might not be counted. Military and elected leaders, along with voting rights advocates, have decried the lawsuits as well, calling them a betrayal of the men and women serving the country overseas. “Literally, these are the people who are putting it all on the line for what we have in America,” said Allison Jaslow, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and now is chief executive of the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “And we’re going to compromise their ability to have a say in how they vote for who sends them to war? It’s just beyond the pale.” Read Article

National: Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’ | Lisa Lerer and Michael Gold/The New York Times

With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him. In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle. A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents. “They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.” Read Article

National: Dominion voting systems is still a GOP bogeyman ahead of the election | Chris Stokel-Walker/Fast Company

The election is nearly here, and Dominion Voting Systems is once again on Republicans’ minds. The voting machine-maker became the subject of conspiracy theories following the 2020 election, which Donald Trump falsely claims was rigged against him. The smear campaigns against Dominion led to death threats and, eventually, lawsuits: In 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion nearly $800 million to avoid a trial in a case that could have shown how the network promoted lies related to the 2020 election. But the GOP is back at it, with Republicans in Georgia filing last month a lawsuit in state court, claiming without evidence that Dominion’s voting systems are not secure. That case was quickly thrown out by a judge who said any such claims were “purely hypothetical”: Not a single vote in the 2024 presidential election had been counted at the time the lawsuit was filed. Apparently even the idea that Dominion might be involved in counting and tabulating ballots was too much for some in the GOP to bear. Read Article

National: At least 30 election deniers and 2020 fake electors serving as Trump electors this year | Marshall Cohen, Danya Gainor, Alison Main, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Casey Tolan and Bob Ortega/CNN

More than a dozen Republicans who were “fake electors” in 2020, including several facing criminal charges, are serving as former President Donald Trump’s official electors in battleground states this year, according to a CNN survey. Another 16 GOP electors from these states are election deniers who say President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was fraudulent. Combined, these election deniers and 2020 fake electors represent more than a third of the 82 electors picked this year to support Trump in the seven states where he attempted to overturn the results in 2020. The involvement of these Republican activists in the Electoral College process this year, especially in critical battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Michigan, could lead to post-election chaos if Trump is defeated and they try again to subvert the will of the voters. Read Article

National: Election officials in southern states are grappling with fallout from dual hurricanes | Curt Devine, Devan Cole and Janat Batra/CNN

Powerful hurricanes that wreaked havoc on wide swaths of the southeast have election officials facing the dim reality that some ballots may be lost in the mail. While in many cases there are remedies to solve the problem, it’s part of the complicated preparations for the upcoming general election, especially in hard-hit North Carolina, a battleground state where communications and power remain spotty in some counties. Hurricane Helene, which hit the US late last month, caused hundreds of deaths across half a dozen states and upended carefully laid election plans as polling centers were crippled and regular communication channels were shattered. Read Article

National: Not everything will run perfectly on Election Day but US elections are remarkably reliable | Gary Fields/Associated Press

On Election Day, some voting lines will likely be long and some precincts may run out of ballots. An election office website could go down temporarily and ballot-counting machines will jam. Or people who help run elections might just act like the humans they are, forgetting their key to a local polling place so it has to open later than scheduled. These kinds of glitches have occurred throughout the history of U.S. elections. Yet election workers across America have consistently pulled off presidential elections and accurately tallied the results — and there’s no reason to believe this year will be any different. Elections are a foundation of democracy. They also are human exercises that, despite all the laws and rules governing how they should run, can sometimes appear to be messy. They’re conducted by election officials and volunteers in thousands of jurisdictions across the United States, from tiny townships to sprawling urban counties with more voters than some states have people. Read Article

National: New wave of GOP lawsuits targets overseas ballots in key swing states | Adam Edelman/NBC

Republicans have filed lawsuits over the past week in three pivotal battleground states seeking to challenge the legitimacy of some ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including military members, arguing that some votes are particularly prone to fraud. Election officials in those states — Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — and nonpartisan voting experts strongly defended the previously uncontroversial overseas voting rules, arguing that the suits amounted to efforts to further lay the groundwork to question the veracity of the election results next month. The Republican National Committee last week sued election officials in North Carolina and Michigan in state courts, alleging they had on their books unlawful rules that extended overseas voting eligibility to people whose residency in those states had not been verified. Read Article

National: Voting Wars Open a New Front: Which Mail Ballots Should Count? | Michael Wines/The New York Times

As Pennsylvania voters begin casting perhaps two million-plus mail ballots, Democrats and Republicans are in furious legal combat over a once-overlooked aspect of voting remotely: which ballots are counted, which are rejected as defective and which ones voters are allowed to correct. Simple math explains why. In the 2020 presidential contest, Pennsylvania election officials rejected more than 34,000 mail ballots. In a tight 2024 election in the most coveted swing state, even a fraction of that many rejections could spell the difference between victory and defeat — not just in the presidential race, but also in any number of others. What’s true in Pennsylvania is true, to varying degrees, in other battleground states. Michigan rejected more than 20,000 mail ballots in 2020 and even more in 2022; Arizona turned down 7,700; Nevada 5,600; and Wisconsin about 3,000. Read Article

National: Election conspiracy theories fueled a push to hand-count votes, but doing so is risky and slow | Christine Fernando/Associated Press

Four years of Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count every vote with people who will do that by hand. Controversies over the issue have flared periodically in pockets of the country before the 2024 presidential election even though research has shown that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results. The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected. Read Article

National: Election officials who back Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ stir concern in swing states | Joseph Tanfani and Nathan Layne/Reuters

In Michigan’s Macomb County, the Republican head of the board that will certify November’s election results called on former U.S. President Donald Trump to fight to stay in power after his election loss in 2020. In North Carolina’s Henderson County, a Republican election board member emailed legislators in August to claim, without evidence, that Democrats were flooding the state with illegal votes. And in Pennsylvania, considered a must win for both Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, Republican officials in six counties have voted against certifying results since 2020. Four years after Trump tried to overturn his election loss, his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud have become an article of faith among many Republican members of local election boards that certify results. Their rise raises the chances that pro-Trump officials in multiple jurisdictions will be able to delay or sow doubt over the Nov. 5 presidential election if Trump loses. Read Article

National: Election offices are preparing for a smooth voting process — and angry voters | /Derek B. JohnsonCyberScoop

Roughly a month out from Election Day, officials from across the country said they remain focused on carrying out a smooth voting process while bracing for the possibility that their offices could be overwhelmed by angry voters and false claims of election fraud. Speaking at a gathering in Washington D.C. hosted by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a bipartisan group of election officials said that while they remain steadfastly confident in the integrity of past elections, they have had to put in place a host of new procedures over the past few years specifically to deal with claims of election malfeasance and fraud from local voters convinced by false claims of vote rigging by Republican candidate Donald Trump and his allies. Read Article

National: Russia, China and Iran Intend to Stoke False Election Claims, Officials Warn | Julian E. Barnes and Steven Lee Myers/The New York Times

Foreign efforts to undermine American democracy will continue after Election Day, U.S. intelligence officials said on Monday, with covert influence campaigns focused on questioning the validity of election results after polls close. Adversaries believe that the possibility of a close presidential race and contested control of the Senate and House of Representatives offer opportunities to undermine trust in the election’s integrity, the officials said as part of an update one month before the vote. The officials said they were worried about foreign adversaries amplifying domestic concerns about voting irregularities, as well as manufacturing their own allegations. After the 2020 vote, Donald J. Trump’s campaign made false allegations about voting irregularities, and he and his supporters have already advanced similar claims ahead of this year’s vote, many of them echoed by Russian state media or Kremlin-friendly organizations. Read Article

National: How China is using X to influence local elections in 2024 campaign | Jeremy B. Merrill , Aaron Schaffer and Naomi Nix/The Washington Post

China is increasingly targeting downballot elections in America, according to a Washington Post analysis and senior U.S. intelligence officials, using fake accounts on social media to spread divisive and sometimes explicitly antisemitic claims and conspiracy theories about politicians — part of an effort to inflame tensions in the country just one month before the 2024 election. One covert influence operation has focused on Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.), who is running to retain his House seat. A China-linked account on X called Moore “a Jewish dog” and claimed he won his primary because of “the bloody Jewish consortium,” among other derogatory tropes, according to a Post analysis of thousands of posts on X, of which about 75 concerned Moore. Moore, who recently backed new sanctions on Chinese officials, is not Jewish. Read Article

National: Judge Unseals New Evidence in Federal Election Case Against Trump | Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage/The New York Times

When told by an aide that Vice President Mike Pence was in peril as the rioting on Capitol Hill escalated on Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald J. Trump replied, “So what?” When one of his lawyers told him that his false claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud would not hold up in court, Mr. Trump responded, “The details don’t matter.” On a flight with Mr. Trump and his family after the election, an Oval Office assistant heard Mr. Trump say: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” Those accounts were among new evidence disclosed in a court filing made public on Wednesday in which the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump made his case for why the former president is not immune from prosecution on federal charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. Read Article

National: Domestic extremists with ‘election-related grievances’ could turn to violence in final weeks of election, FBI and DHS warn | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are concerned that “election-related grievances,” such as a belief in voter fraud, could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence in the weeks before and after the November election, as it did during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to a new intelligence bulletin from the agencies. Domestic violent extremists [DVEs] “continue to create, exploit, and promote narratives about the election process or legal decisions involving political figures, and we are concerned that these grievances could motivate some DVEs to engage in violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle,” the FBI and DHS said in the bulletin sent to state and local officials and private executives. Read Article

National: ‘Damning non-answer’: Vance refuses to acknowledge Trump lost the 2020 election | Ryan J. Reilly/NBC

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election during the vice presidential debate Tuesday and downplayed the seriousness of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which injured more than 140 law enforcement officers. He also declined to say whether he would seek to challenge the results of this year’s election. Toward the end of the debate, Democratic vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz asked Vance to affirm that Trump lost the last election. “Did he lose the 2020 election?” Walz asked. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied before he pivoted to press Walz about censorship on social media. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said. “I’m pretty shocked by this. He lost the election. This is not a debate, it’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world.” Read Article

National: Trump Allies Bombard the Courts, Setting Stage for Post-Election Fight | Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Republicans have unleashed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ahead of the November elections, setting the stage for what could be a far larger and more contentious legal battle over the White House after Election Day. The onslaught of litigation, much of it landing in recent weeks, includes nearly 90 lawsuits filed across the country by Republican groups this year. The legal push is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before Election Day in 2020. Read Article

National: Homeless People Have the Right to Vote — but Often Lack the Ability | Jule Pattison-Gordon/Governing

There’s no constitutional requirement to have a home in order to vote. In practical terms, however, it can sometimes feel like it. Individuals experiencing homelessness often struggle to meet voter ID requirements, stay on voting rolls or get to polling locations, among other obstacles. Although 54 percent of all eligible voters turned out back in 2012, only about 10 percent of homeless citizens voted. “If we could get that number up to 20 or 30 percent, it would make a big difference, especially with local elections,” said Donald Whitehead, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “When people are thinking about structuring voter rights laws, they should be thinking about every citizen, not just those who are affluent or who have means.” Read Article

National: Republicans’ non-citizen voting myth sets stage to claim stolen election | Rachel Leingang and Sam Levine/The Guardian

James Cozadd, a 49-year-old plumber born in Montgomery, Alabama, has no idea why he got a letter from Alabama’s top election official telling him he was potentially ineligible to vote. He was born in the US, yet the letter said he was suspected of being a non-citizen and he would have to prove his citizenship to vote. “I’ve been racking my brain to try to figure out how I ended up on the list of purged voters, but I have no clue,” Cozadd said in a court filing in September. He was one of more than 3,200 voters the secretary of state asked to prove their citizenship – part of a wave of actions amid heated rhetoric among Republicans over the idea that non-citizens could be voting in large numbers in US elections, a theory that runs counter to data. Read Article

National: To combat voter fraud claims, election officials try radical transparency | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

In this conservative bedroom community of Phoenix, where Donald Trump remains popular and his 2020 loss is viewed with suspicion, election falsehoods don’t fizzle. They fester and grow. So as Pinal County officials prepare for another election with the former president on the ballot, they are trying to combat that distrust with radical transparency. “When you know in your soul there is nothing to hide, being open about the process is a no-brainer,” said Pinal County Recorder Dana Lewis (R), who helps oversee elections. “Even when you pull the curtain back, there are still people who lurk in the shadows, but we are going to continue to try with logic, accuracy and reason to combat the narrative of distrust in the elections process.” Read Article

National: Little-noticed statehouse races could reshape election policies next year | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

Americans agree the fate of democracy rests on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, even if they don’t agree on what that outcome should be. But they may be too focused on the top of the ticket. A small number of lower-profile state legislative races in districts around the country could shift partisan control of legislative chambers in several key swing states next year, potentially allowing state lawmakers to reshape how elections are run. “What’s really going to impact most voters when it comes to how they experience their elections — the timing of their elections, when ballots are counted, how things are processed, security and infrastructure changes — that’s all happening at the state level,” said Megan Boler Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that monitors state legislation on voting and elections.fit group that monitors state legislation on voting and elections. Read Article

National: Election experts raise alarms about vote counting delays in battleground states | Fredreka Schouten and Sara Murray/CNN

In Pennsylvania, officials are bracing for another presidential election in which the state could once again be the decisive battleground and take days to determine the winner. Seth Bluestein, a Republican city commissioner in vote-rich Philadelphia, put the odds of knowing the winner on election night at “almost zero.” In battleground Wisconsin, meanwhile, a final tally isn’t likely until the morning after the election, said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the state’s election commission. Election observers worry that delays in counting mail ballots could give the public a false sense of who’s winning the election. That could create a potential “red mirage” – showing GOP candidates ahead initially before more Democratic-leaning absentee ballots are processed and added to the tally – and leave an opening for false narratives about election fraud to flourish as the country awaits results. Read Article

National: Several states are making late changes to election rules, even as voting is set to begin | Ali Swenson/Associated Press