National

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

In Georgia, election workers will have to hand count the number of ballots cast after voting is completed. In North Carolina, some students and university staff can use their digital IDs to vote. In Wisconsin, ballot drop boxes are newly legal again, although not every voting jurisdiction will use them. Across the country, including in some of the nation’s presidential swing states, new or recently altered state laws are changing how Americans will vote, tally ballots, and administer and certify November’s election. It can be a challenge to keep track of these 11th-hour changes, especially since state election processes already vary so widely. Even more changes are looming in some states, with Election Day on Nov. 5 now just weeks away. Several states already have started sending out mail ballots, and in some states, voters have begun casting ballots in person. Read Article

National: The R.N.C. Asked a Conspiracy Theorist to Train Poll Watchers. Here’s What He Told Them. | Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

A few years ago, Jack Posobiec was a fringe figure and a right-wing agitator best known for helping spread “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory about Democrats running a satanic child abuse ring underneath a Washington pizza parlor. This month, he was invited by the Republican National Committee to speak to a group of volunteers about how to monitor elections in Michigan. The invitation was one sign of how the party uses figures and fictions that were once considered out of bounds to energize its activists. The counsel that Mr. Posobiec delivered was another. He blasted elections in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia, for example, joking that officials in Venezuela learned how to conduct their elections, widely seen as corrupt, by visiting the city and studying how it is done, according to a recording of the Sept. 4 meeting. Read Article

National: Overseas voters are the latest target in Trump’s false narrative on election fraud | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

Donald Trump this week claimed without evidence that anyone living overseas can get a ballot mailed to them, even if they are not eligible to vote, falsely accusing Democrats of subverting a 1986 law to win in November. The former Republican president’s allegation focuses on the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA, which protects the rights of U.S. citizens living abroad, including members of the military and their families, to vote in federal elections by absentee ballot. “In over 25 years of working in elections, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and with election officials of both parties, I don’t recall any of them, or any elected leader from either party, ever denigrating this important program, until Trump’s false claims this week,” said David Becker, the founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research. Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, agreed that “ensuring these voters can vote has never been controversial. I should say, never before.” Read Article

National: Newsmax and Smartmatic Settle Defamation Case Over 2020 Election | Katie Robertson/The New York Times

Smartmatic on Thursday settled its defamation lawsuit against Newsmax, the right-wing cable news channel that had spread false claims of election fraud, the companies said. The details of the settlement, reached as the jury was being selected before the trial, were not immediately disclosed. Smartmatic, an election technology company, had accused Newsmax of trying to entice viewers from its rival, Fox News, by airing false reports that Smartmatic helped swing the 2020 election for Joe Biden The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Superior Court in 2021. Read Article

National: Lawmakers’ concerns about mail ballots are fueled by other issues with mail service | John Hanna/Associated Press

Lawmakers said during a contentious congressional hearing Thursday they are uneasy about the U.S. Postal Service’s readiness for a crush of mail ballots for the November election because some of them feel burned by other Postal Service actions. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy sought to reassure a House Appropriations subcommittee that the Postal Service is well-positioned for an extraordinary effort to deliver mail ballots to election officials on time to be counted and that close to 100% will make it promptly. In recent weeks, DeJoy has pushed back on suggestions from state and local election officials that the Postal Service has not addressed problems that led to mail ballots arriving too late or without postmarks, disenfranchising those voters. Read Article

National: How U.S. Adversaries Undermine the Perception of Election Integrity | Max Lesser and Mark Montgomery/Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Hacking election infrastructure remains difficult, but attempts to hack people’s minds can be as easy as spinning up fake social media profiles and websites. While federal agencies and election officials repeatedly affirm the physical security and cybersecurity of U.S. elections,1 a significant vulnerability remains — the public’s belief in the integrity of elections. America’s adversaries — specifically China, Russia, and Iran — are seeking to cast doubt on the very value of democratic processes because America’s most enduring asset is the strength of its democracy. Exposing these malicious campaigns limits our adversaries’ ability to sow discord and spread lies about America’s political system. Read Article

National: Russian threat groups shift attention to Harris-Walz campaign, researchers find | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

It took a little while for Russian influence operation peddlers to shift their attention from the Biden campaign to the Harris campaign, Microsoft said in a report published Tuesday, but now Kremlin-affiliated groups are ratcheting up fake videos about the Democratic presidential ticket. In late August and September, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center observed two separate Russian groups pushing videos designed to discredit Vice President Kamala Harris in places like a fake San Francisco news website and on the social media platform X. The phony videos claimed Harris was involved in a fabricated hit-and-run accident, depicted an attack by alleged Harris supporters on a purported Trump rally attendee and showed a fake New York City billboard making false claims about Harris’ policies. Read Article

National: Election officials prepare for threats with panic buttons, bulletproof glass | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The election director in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb where votes will be fiercely contested in this year’s presidential race, recently organized a five-hour training session. The focus wasn’t solely on the nuts-and-bolts of running this year’s election. Instead, it brought together election staff and law enforcement to strategize on how to keep workers safe and the process of voting and ballot-counting secure. Having a local sheriff’s deputy at early voting locations and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher are among the added security steps the office is taking this year. Read Article

National: Suspicious mail sent to election officials in multiple states | Maegan Vazquez and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

Federal authorities are investigating several suspicious pieces of mail sent to election officials in at least 17 states, some of which contained a questionable substance and led to building evacuations this week. An image of one of the suspicious pieces of mail, shared with The Washington Post by an election official in a battleground state, showed that the sender was listed as the “United States Traitor Elimination Army” and it had a return address originating in Maryland. The piece of mail, a large yellow envelope, was addressed to the Nebraska Elections Division. The FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said in a joint statement Tuesday that they are investigating what they referred to as “a series of suspicious mailings sent to election officials in several states.” Read Article

National: Russia goes all-out with covert disinformation aimed at Harris, Microsoft report says | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

The video was seen millions of times across social media but some viewers were suspicious: It featured a young Black woman who claimed Vice President Kamala Harris left her paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident in San Francisco 13 years ago. In an emotional retelling from a wheelchair, the alleged victim said she “cannot remain silent anymore” and lamented that her childhood had “ended too soon.” Immediately after the video was posted on Sept. 2, social media users pointed out reasons to be wary. The purported news channel it came from, San Francisco’s KBSF-TV, didn’t exist. A website for the channel set up just a week earlier contained plagiarized articles from real news outlets. The woman’s X-ray images shown in the video were taken from online medical journals. And the video and the text story on the website spelled the alleged victim’s name differently. Read Article

National: US Senate Warns Big Tech to Act Fast Against Election Meddling | Dell Cameron/WIRED

Top officials from Google, Apple, and Meta testified Wednesday before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee about each of their company’s ongoing efforts to identify and disrupt foreign influence campaigns ahead of the country’s November elections. The hearing, chaired by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, served largely to impress upon the companies the need for more extensive safeguards against the disinformation campaigns being funded by foreign entities with an eye on influencing US politics. “This is really our effort to try to urge you guys to do more. To alert the public that this has not gone away,” Warner said. Read Article

National: Trump’s Talk of Prosecution Rattles Election Officials | Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s escalating calls to investigate and prosecute election officials he sees as “corrupt” are sounding alarms among democracy experts and the local and state workers preparing to run elections and tally millions of votes across the country. In recent social media posts, Mr. Trump has said that election officials “involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” Read Article

National: House Defeats Spending Bill Tied to New Rules Requiring Proof of U.S. Citizenship to Register to Vote | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

The House on Wednesday defeated a $1.6 trillion stopgap spending bill to extend current government funding into March and impose new proof-of-citizenship requirements on voter registration, as Republicans and Democrats alike rejected Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposal to avert a shutdown at the end of the month. The bipartisan repudiation was entirely expected after several Republicans had made clear they would not back the spending plan and Democrats almost uniformly opposed the voting-registration proposal. The vote was 220 to 202, with 14 Republicans joining all but three Democrats in opposition. Two Republicans voted present. Read Article

National: In-person voting for the US presidential contest starts today in Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

The Democratic and Republican national conventions are just a memory, the first and perhaps only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is in the bag, and election offices are beginning to send out absentee ballots. Now come the voters. Friday is the start of early in-person voting for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, kicking off in Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota, the home state of Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz. The first ballots being cast in person come with just over six weeks left before Election Day on Nov. 5. About a dozen more states will follow with early in-person voting by mid-October. Read Article

Illinois: Contractor’s unsecured databases exposed sensitive voter data in over a dozen counties | Andrew Adams/Capitol News Illinois

Around 4.6 million records associated with Illinoisans in over a dozen counties – including voting records, registrations and death certificates – were temporarily available on the open internet, according to a security researcher who identified the vulnerability in July. The documents were available through an unsecured cloud storage platform. They included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and voter registration history. Election security experts said the breach is unlikely to affect the upcoming election but could make affected individuals susceptible to identity theft. The researcher, Jeremiah Fowler, has also identified similar data vulnerabilities which exposed thousands of rail passengers’ travel details in the United Kingdom and over 4 million student records in the U.S., among others. Read Article

National: Fears mount that election deniers could disrupt vote count in US swing states | Ed Pilkington/The Guardian

Fears are rising that the vote count in November’s presidential election could be disrupted as a result of the proliferation of Donald Trump’s lies about stolen elections and rampant voter fraud in the key swing states where the race for the White House will be decided. A new survey of eight vital swing states reveals that at least 239 election deniers who have signed up to Trump’s “election integrity” conspiracy theories – including the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him – are actively engaged in electoral battles this year. The deniers are standing for congressional or state seats, holding Republican leadership positions, and overseeing elections on state and county election boards. Read Article

National: 2024 election faces foreign influence efforts from Russia, Iran, China | Hayley Fuchs and Josh Gerstein/Politico

The season of foreign election interference is well underway. The Department of Justice this week announced it had seized websites linked to a Russian disinformation campaign. Federal authorities separately accused two employees of the Moscow-controlled media organization RT of being a part of a scheme to spread Russian propaganda, bolstered by millions of dollars. And it’s not just Russia. On Friday, a hawkish think tank revealed that a network of pro-Iranian sites have been circulating disinformation around the election. That comes on the heels of the intelligence community linking Iran to a hacking of the Trump campaign. U.S. officials said in a briefing with reporters on Friday that Russia, Iran and China were all trying to influence the upcoming elections. Read Article

National: Trump threatens lawyers, donors and election officials with prison for ‘unscrupulous behavior’ | Jillian Frankel/NBC

Former President Donald Trump, who makes frequent false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through rampant fraud, warned Saturday that he would try to imprison anyone who engages in “unscrupulous behavior” during this year’s race. Election workers across the country have been subject to threats, most famously Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, two election workers whose entire lives were uprooted when Trump and his allies targeted them after the 2020 election with false accusations of fraud. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump began making baseless warnings of election interference, which grew louder after he lost and culminated in a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to block certification of Joe Biden’s election. He has begun making similar statements ahead of this year’s election. Read Article

National: How unfounded GOP claims about noncitizen voting could cost some eligible voters their rights | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

At Tuesday’s presidential debate, former President Donald Trump once again asserted that “elections are bad” and that Democrats are trying to get immigrants who’ve entered the country illegally to vote. As fact checks pointed out and Votebeat has previously reported, there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting, and experts say it is extraordinarily rare. Republicans, though, continue to allege that voting by noncitizens is a pressing problem that demands a legislative solution. And the assertions aren’t just political theater: They are already affecting actual voters, and the impact could grow. Trump wants Republicans to shut down the federal government until they get their way on legislation requiring everyone registering to vote to provide documentary proof of citizenship. Read Article

National: CISA publishes cybersecurity checklist ahead of November election | Sophia Fox-Sowell/StateScoop

With the U.S. presidential election less than two months away, state and local election administrators finalizing operations can turn to a cybersecurity checklist published Monday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to ensure their infrastructure is protected from malicious actors. The checklist outlines a series of steps election officials can take to protect their election infrastructure, including networks that store, host or process voter registration information, public-facing election websites that support functions like election night reporting and polling place lookup, as well as email and other critical business operations, which remain attractive targets for cybercriminals. Read Article

National: Bipartisan group of lawmakers signs pledge to certify 2024 election results | Sarah Ferris/Politico

More than 30 House members, including a half-dozen Republicans, have signed a bipartisan pledge to uphold the results of the 2024 election amid an increased focus on Congress’ role in certifying the tally next January. A pair of House centrists, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.), have worked for months to organize what they’re calling a “unity commitment” — an agreement to “safeguard the fairness and integrity” of this fall’s presidential election. Five other Republicans also signed on: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) and Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.). None of the six Republicans who signed the pledge voted against certifying the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. (Several of them were not yet in office.) A total of 139 House Republicans did vote against certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. Read Article

National: Justice Dept. Official Calls Election Meddling a ‘Clear and Present Danger’ | Glenn Thrush/The New York Times

The Justice Department’s top national security official warned on Thursday that foreign interference in the 2024 election posed a “clear and present danger” and said that Russia was ramping up its disinformation efforts in hopes of helping former President Donald J. Trump. Matthew G. Olsen, the head of the department’s national security division, cited Iran’s recent hacking of the Trump campaign as evidence that some adversaries were also seeking to damage Mr. Trump’s chances of victory, though Tehran tried, unsuccessfully, to hack Democratic campaigns as well. Mr. Olsen, amplifying warnings issued by the U.S. intelligence community and senior F.B.I. officials, did not suggest that Mr. Trump or any of his associates were working with overseas actors. He also identified China as posing a serious threat to the election. Read Article

National: Officials warn that problems with US mail system could disrupt voting | John Hanna and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press