Pennsylvania: Right-wing group sues over errors in voter registration records | Angela Couloumbis and Carter Walker/Spotlight PA

A far-right group is asking a judge to order Pennsylvania to clean up its voter roll, citing flaws it claims to have found in voter registration data as evidence that the state is violating federal law. The group’s claims, however, appear to contradict facts about how the state’s voting systems work, reflecting what one election expert suggested is a “gross misunderstanding of election law.” Much of the information in the suit comes from groups with histories of making false claims about the state’s voter rolls, and the suit includes at least one easily disproved claim. The lawsuit is part of a broader strategy that the lead plaintiff, United Sovereign Americans, has acknowledged: to challenge voter rolls across the country, in separate federal court jurisdictions, to force the issue up to the U.S. Supreme Court in time to affect the 2024 general election. The group filed a similar suit in Maryland that was dismissed in May because the plaintiffs didn’t have legal grounds to sue. Read Article

South Dakota: Hand counting errors muddle post-election audit in McPherson County | Stu Whitney/SD Newswatch

South Dakota’s most populous county, Minnehaha, was in the spotlight this week after its top election official ordered the county’s post-election audit to consist of all 2024 primary ballots being counted by hand. But the debate over counting votes by hand vs. machines found a more decisive venue 250 miles away in McPherson County, on the state’s northeast edge bordering North Dakota, with a population of about 2,300. On June 13, citizen hand-counting boards were formed in the county seat of Leola, South Dakota, to conduct a post-election audit of 100% of the ballots from the June 4 primary, which had been tallied by machine tabulators on election day. Read Article

Texas: Fixing ballot secrecy problems won’t be easy, experts say | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

When Pam Anderson was a county elections clerk in Colorado about a decade ago, she worried about whether the state’s increasingly transparent election process had made it possible to link a ballot to the voter who cast it. As a test, she asked her staff in Jefferson County to see whether they could find a ballot that she had cast in a previous election. It took them less than 20 minutes. Since then, Colorado has taken steps to protect a voter’s right to a secret ballot: Election officials there remove the voting method and polling location from public reports detailing voter participation. The state has invested in training election officials to redact information from the records it releases publicly, and purchased technology to help make those redactions more efficiently, Anderson said. Such measures could help point the way forward for Texas, where recent laws enacted in the name of increasing election transparency have made it possible — in limited instances — to use public records and data to determine how individual voters voted. Read Article

Wisconsin judge allows disabled voters to electronically vote from home | Todd Richmond/Associated Press

Local election officials in battleground state Wisconsin will be allowed to send absentee ballots to disabled voters electronically in November’s presidential election, a judge ruled Tuesday. Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell issued a temporary injunction that allows voters who self-certify that they can’t read or mark a paper ballot without help to request absentee ballots electronically from local clerks. The voters can then cast their ballots at home using devices that help them read and write independently. They will still be required to mail the ballots back to the clerks or return them in person, the same as any other absentee voter in the state. More than 30 states allow certain voters to return their ballots either by fax, email or an online portal, according to data collected by the National Conference of State Legislatures and Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that studies state voting systems. The method has expanded in recent years to include disabled voters in a dozen states. Experts have warned, however, that electronic ballot return carries risks of ballots being intercepted or manipulated and should be used sparingly. Read Article

Wisconsin election officials get some clarity on which tasks they’re allowed to outsource | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Wisconsin election officials welcomed a clarification from the state attorney general this week on the scope of a constitutional amendment limiting who can conduct elections. But some local clerks and legal experts aren’t convinced that it’s enough to curb confusion over the measure or the risk of disruptive lawsuits. The short text of the amendment states, “No individual other than an election official designated by law may perform any task in the conduct of any primary, election, or referendum.” The opinion from Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, held that clerks can continue working with private vendors on tasks like ballot design, despite a conservative group suggesting — and clerks fearing — otherwise. The amendment “does not apply to more ordinary circumstances in which an election official works with or is assisted by non-election officials in ensuring the proper administration of an election,” Kaul said. He added that clerks can continue working with non-election officials to print ballots and enhance cybersecurity, and can use law enforcement personnel to transfer ballots. Read Article

Wyoming: New initiative seeks to hand count ballots in elections | Wyoming | Jasmine Hall/Gillette News Record

The same group trying to cut property taxes in half is pushing for hand counting ballots in Wyoming elections. Organizers Brent Bien, Cheryl Aguiar and Rich Weber filed their second ballot initiative in January with the Secretary of State’s Office. Now they are traveling across the state to showcase why they believe the change is necessary. Their latest effort seeks to require county clerks to use a hand tabulation system instead of using electronic ballot processing machines. County Clerks’ Association of Wyoming President Malcolm Ervin said election officers have full faith in the machines, testing and auditing procedures already in place in Wyoming. Read Article

Picketed at work, confronted at church: Why election workers have left the job | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Over the course of 20 years as an election administrator in Shasta County, Calif., Cathy Darling Allen oversaw nearly a dozen national election cycles and countless local races. In February, she decided she’d had enough. Allen announced she would be retiring, citing the negative impact that the job was having on her health, especially in recent years. In a public letter, she wrote that she had been diagnosed with heart failure and her chances for recovery relied on substantial stress reduction, something that was “a tough ask to balance with election administration in the current environment.” In an interview with CyberScoop, Allen was more blunt about what triggered her decision to leave: “Being concerned on a daily basis about your own physical safety and the safety of the folks who work for us and the voters who come in to cast their ballots takes a toll.” Allen is not alone in choosing to step down as an election administrator. Across the United States election officials are leaving their posts in droves, citing threats, harassment and acts of violence at levels not seen in decades — a development that experts caution  poses a far greater threat to U.S. elections than malicious hackers or AI-enabled deepfakes. Read Article

National: States struggle with unreliable federal funding for making sure elections are secure | Jennifer Shutt/Stateline

The federal government has sought to bolster election security for years through a popular grant program, but the wildly fluctuating funding levels have made it difficult for state officials to plan their budgets and their projects. Rising misinformation and disinformation about elections, often fueled by conspiracy theories, as well as threats against election workers, make the grants especially important, according to elections officials. But U.S. House Republicans are seeking to eliminate funding for election security grants — known as Help America Vote Act, or HAVA grants — in this year’s appropriations process, a move they also unsuccessfully attempted last year. “We continue to unnecessarily risk the very integrity of our elections and American democracy,” Georgia Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop said last week during committee debate on the funding bill. Bishop, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he was “concerned about the outdated and the insecure voting systems around the country that pose a very, very serious threat to our national security and to our democratic system.” Read Article

National: Rage against the voting machine | Joseph Gedeon/Politico

Elon Musk set the Xverse ablaze this weekend with a viral post calling to “eliminate electronic voting machines” due to hacking risks, racking up over 75,000 reposts. It came after independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seized on voting irregularities in Puerto Rico’s recent primary to demand a return to hand-marked paper ballots nationwide. “Flip the claim that there’s ‘no evidence of widespread fraud.’ We have evidence of sound elections,” said Pamela Smith, president of the nonpartisan Verified Voting, which promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. Smith argues that while tiny jurisdictions can feasibly hand count ballots, moving to full manual counts in larger locales would be a logistical nightmare — delaying results for weeks or months and costing counties millions to hire enough workers. Not to mention studies showing machines tend to tally votes more accurately than humans do. Read Article

National: 334 public officials in 5 swing states who cast doubt on elections are now influencing them | Erin Mansfield/USA Today

Hundreds of public officials in five key swing states have denied election outcomes, tried to overturn an election or made statements to undermine an election, a new study says. The study identified 334 of these public officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin running the gamut from a state’s second-highest elected official to local boards that certify election results. Those closely divided states are likely to decide the 2024 presidential election. The study by Public Wise, a left-leaning nonprofit group that advocates for representative democracy, is the most comprehensive study to date of state and local public officials who have power over elections but whose commitment to election fairness has been questioned. Most officials Public Wise identified are state lawmakers, and many signed on to letters asking various state and federal officials to stand in the way of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Others include elected county commissioners, elected county sheriffs, elected town officials, and people appointed to run day-to-day election administration or perform routine signoffs on vote certification. Read Article

National: The RNC is launching a massive effort to monitor voting. Critics say it threatens to undermine trust | Joey Cappelletti and Ali Swenson/Associated Press

The Republican National Committee on Friday launched a swing state initiative to mobilize thousands of polling place monitors, poll workers and attorneys to serve as “election integrity” watchdogs in November — an effort that immediately drew concerns that it could lead to harassment of election workers and undermine trust in the vote. The RNC says its plan will help voters have faith in the electoral process and ensure their votes matter. Yet, as former President Donald Trump and his allies continue to spread false claims that the 2020 election was marred by widespread fraud, the effort also sets the stage for a repeat of Trump’s efforts to undermine the results — a gambit that ultimately led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump allies already have signaled that they might not accept the results if he loses to President Joe Biden. Read Article

National: The Biden administration has no firm plan to call out domestic disinformation in the 2024 election | Dan De Luce and Ken Dilanian/NBC

The Biden administration has no firm plans to alert the public about deepfakes or other false information during the 2024 election unless it is clearly coming from a foreign actor and poses a sufficiently grave threat, according to current and former officials. Although cyber experts in and outside of government expect an onslaught of disinformation and deepfakes during this year’s election campaign, officials in the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security remain worried that if they weigh in, they will face accusations that they are attempting to tilt the election in favor of President Joe Biden’s re-election. Lawmakers from both parties have urged the Biden administration to take a more assertive stance. “I’m worried that you may be overly concerned with appearing partisan and that that will freeze you in terms of taking the actions that are necessary,” Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, told cybersecurity and intelligence officials at a hearing last month. Read Article

National: U.S. election official: ‘Whack-a-mole’ strategies less effective to combat disinfo | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Disinformation continues to be a top focus for policymakers concerned with the integrity of elections, but changes in how the public utilizes social media over the past decade have made it harder for defenders — and attackers — to repeat the same playbooks, a top U.S. cybersecurity official said Tuesday. Speaking at a Semafor cybersecurity event in Washington D.C Cait Conley, a senior adviser at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said that foreign influence operations, disinformation and artificial intelligence remain an area of concern for election officials. But traditional efforts around content moderation and takedowns of online networks are becoming more challenging and less impactful as social media use becomes more fragmented among different audiences. “The whack-a-mole strategies that have been employed in the past when it comes to disinformation, it’s not going to be effective given today’s information environment,” Conley said. “There’s more platforms, there’s more methods of distribution, we see migrations not just of social media platforms but of chat channels.” Read Article

National: How Climate Change Threatens Democracy | Karen Florini and Alice C. Hill/Foreign Affairs

This year, at least 68 countries will hold elections, with billions of voters heading to the polls. Voting will be subject to many of the usual electoral risks, including disinformation campaigns, foreign interference, and rigging by incumbents. In some states, both incumbents and challengers could even use violence to keep certain people at home. But there will be another factor, one not yet widely considered, that could skew results: the physical forces unleashed by climate change. They present a unique and novel challenge. Although all electoral threats are serious, the ones brought by climate change have the potential to disenfranchise voters even in the absence of malevolent intent. The disenfranchisement of even a few voters can make a profound difference in election outcomes, as in the case of the 537 votes in Florida that determined the U.S. presidential election in 2000. As extreme weather events become more frequent, the risk to voters will grow. Read Article

Arizona: Documents detail Republican push to force hand counts | Rachel Leingang/The Guardian

Republican elected officials in a small Arizona county talked with state lawmakers and activists about hand-counting ballots there in 2022 and urged their counterparts in other counties to push for hand counts as well, newly released public records show. The records from Cochise county, a Republican stronghold along the US-Mexico border, only came to light after a lawsuit from a watchdog group, American Oversight, and took well over a year to be released. The original records request from American Oversight was filed in November 2022. They show how Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, two of the three-member board of supervisors, were both advocating for hand-counting ballots as election denialism and skepticism gripped the county. The two supervisors also delayed certification of the county’s election results in 2022, which resulted in criminal charges in a case that is still ongoing. Read Article

Alaska: U.S. Justice Department finds state discriminates against disabled voters | Iris Samuels/Anchorage Daily News

The Alaska Division of Elections has violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by making voting inaccessible to disabled Alaskans, the U.S. Department of Justice found in a recent investigation. The DOJ found that “Alaska discriminates on the basis of disability” in an investigation initiated in response to complaints that alleged that “accessible voting machines that would allow persons with disabilities to vote privately and independently, were either unavailable at voting sites, or if available, they did not work.” The investigation examined statewide elections held in 2022 and 2023. The investigation detailed several problems that hinder disabled voters’ ability to participate in elections. For state and federal elections, the state did not provide accessible voting machines during early voting and on Election Day, despite claiming that it provides such machines. In some locations where the machines were present, they were not operational, the investigation found. In at least one polling place, the machine was “unassembled in its shipping box.” In other locations, poll workers reported that they “could not operate” the accessible machines. Read Article

California: Shasta County supervisors hire lawyer to lead county elections office | Damon Arthur/Redding Record Searchlight

The Shasta County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday appointed as its next registrar of voters a semi-retired former prosecutor with no experience in managing an elections department, a job he described as a “critical” position with a presidential election looming in November. Thomas Toller, 62, said during his public job interview with the supervisors Tuesday and Wednesday that he could quickly get up to speed on learning California election laws and get to know the staff at the county clerk and registrar of voters office. “I look forward to the opportunity to serve the people of Shasta County. And my greatest hope is that I can bring some transparency to the office and increase people’s confidence in how we process votes here in Shasta County,” Toller said after the board’s 3-2 vote to hire him. Read Article

Georgia becomes first state to require election law training for police | George Chidi/The Guardian

Georgia is the first state to mandate training in election law in order for police to become state certified, a reflection of lessons learned in the aftermath of the state’s 2020 race. The new requirement for police trainees to take a one-hour course on election laws is meant to keep officers from trying to guess at how to enforce the law on election day, said Chris Harvey, deputy executive director for the Georgia peace officer standards and training council. “Cops just really need to know what are some of the basic ground rules around elections and voting, because they’re very specific,” he said. “In my opinion, the worst thing that can happen is if you have a partisan person or partisan force trying to manipulate the police, and have the police not have any idea what they’re supposed to be doing.” Read Article

Michigan Supreme Court weighs legality of Secretary of State’s guidance on election challengers | Beth LeBlanc/The Detroit News

Michigan Supreme Court justices will decide in the coming weeks whether guidelines issued by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to govern the handling of challengers at polling places can withstand the scrutiny of Republican opponents. Justices heard about an hour of argument Tuesday over Zoom on a case that challenges a manual issued by Benson to clerks in 2022 that set out instructions for election challengers, including a uniform credential form for challengers, limits on when their challenges should be recorded and bans on electronic device possession in closed-door absentee voting counting rooms while polling precincts are open. Several election challengers and the state and national Republican parties filed suit soon after the guidelines were issued, arguing they conflict with state election law and constituted rules that should have gone through the rulemaking process. Read Article

Nevada: Judge tosses initial GOP lawsuit alleging voter rolls insufficiently maintained | Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

A federal judge on Tuesday approved a motion to dismiss a GOP-led lawsuit alleging that Nevada had insufficiently maintained its voter rolls, but will allow for an amended complaint addressing standing issues to be re-filed with the court. After a two hour hearing in Las Vegas, U.S. District Court Judge Cristina Silva ruled that the Republican National Committee (RNC) and Nevada GOP lacked standing to file the lawsuit. She also ruled that there was no way for the state to resolve the alleged issues when the lawsuit was filed, owing to federal guidelines on the timing of amending voting roll programs to remove ineligible voters. The groups have 14 days to amend their complaint. Read Article

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