Ohio’s anti-tech rural counties work to ban voting machines for “Flintstones” hand-counting | Cleveland Plain Dealer

A growing movement in rural Ohio counties is pushing to abandon modern voting technology in favor of hand-counted paper ballots, sparking criticism of those who would debilitate election security and accuracy. Friday’s episode of Today in Ohio blasted the idea. “It would be a disaster if we let idiots start to set policy. People who don’t understand science, so they just want to reject it,” said Chris Quinn during the discussion. “This is a backward way of thinking. And really, I wish we had a time machine so we could ship them back to the Middle Ages, which is where they want to be.” The push is coming from a group calling themselves the “Coalition of Concerned Voters” in Monroe and Seneca counties, who are fighting to get a local referendum on the ballot that would replace electronic voting machines with hand-counted paper ballots. Their argument? Ohioans never really had a say in adopting machines in the first place, and they don’t trust the audit process that samples approximately 5 percent of ballots. Read Article

Pennsylvania: A federal appeals court affirmed state can’t throw out misdated mail ballots. What could happen next? | Lindsay Shachnow/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In Pennsylvania, absentee and mail ballots must be received by county elections offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day. So requiring voters to date their ballots didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose, said Justin Levitt, an election law expert and law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Why are you throwing out something as important as somebody’s vote for something that isn’t important at all?” he said. “It’s like throwing somebody’s ballot out if they use black pen rather than blue pen.” Last week, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The federal court ordered Pennsylvania to stop throwing out mail ballots that are incorrectly dated by voters, affirming earlier court rulings. But the legal fight is unlikely to end there. Read Article

Pennsylvania nuns who stood up to claims of election fraud win national award | Carter Walker/Votebeat

As the 2024 presidential election approached, tensions were high, and activists were, once again, hunting for fraud. Cliff Maloney, a Republican activist working to get GOP voters to return their mail ballots, said on the social network X that one of his door-to-door canvassers had discovered an address in Erie, Pennsylvania, that had no residents but 53 voters registered to it. “Turns out it’s the Benedictine Sisters of Erie and NO ONE lives there,” he wrote in a post that went viral, adding that he would not let “Dems count illegal votes.” But that wasn’t true. And Maloney found himself being called out by the nuns, who didn’t appreciate being accused of fraud. “We do live at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery and a simple web search would alert him to our active presence in a number of ministries in Erie,” Sister Stephanie Schmidt, of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, said in a statement, calling Maloney’s post “blatantly false.” Read Article

Some Texas counties replace touchscreen voting machines after Trump order | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

After years of using a touchscreen machine to mark their ballots, voters in at least three Texas counties will be asked instead to make their selections directly on the paper ballots, by hand, starting in November. Election officials in Collin, Williamson, and Bastrop counties said they’re proactively changing their voting procedures and equipment in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump in March that sought to mostly ban voting equipment that uses barcodes or QR codes on paper ballots to speed up vote counting. Some other provisions in the executive order have been blocked by the courts, but this one has not. The order instructed the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which crafts the certification guidelines that most states rely on for their voting equipment, to amend the guidelines to prohibit such systems and “take appropriate action” to review and rescind previously issued certifications based on prior standards. Read Article

White House changes course after Trump vows executive order to ‘end’ mail-in voting | John T. Bennett/Roll Call

The White House has abruptly altered course on President Donald Trump’s vow to have an elite legal team craft an executive order that would end mail-in voting, with a top aide saying the administration would instead forge a legislative path. “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt,” he told reporters. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday, just over 24 hours later, signaled that the administration had ditched the president’s approach. Asked what changed so quickly, and whether Trump had received a legal ruling from within the administration that his office lacked the authority to make such a dramatic election change, a White House spokesman merely lobbed accusations at Democrats and repeated Trump’s 2024 campaign platform on the issue. Read Article

National: Voting officials are leaving their jobs at the highest rate in decades | Miles Parks/NPR

Turnover among the country’s election officials has continued to increase — now nearly five years after Donald Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 contest led to voting officials facing more pressure and harassment. Some 2 in 5 of all the local officials who administered the 2020 election left their jobs before the 2024 cycle, according to research out Tuesday from the Bipartisan Policy Center. The trend was especially pronounced in large jurisdictions, where the Trump campaign’s misinformation about voting often focused. “This is in alignment with the challenges, burnout, threats and harassment that election officials are facing,” said Rachel Orey, who oversees the center’s Elections Project. Read Article

National: Trump Doubles Down on Mail-In Ballot Broadside: GOP Will Do ‘Everything Possible to Get Rid’ of Them | im Saksa/Democracy Docket

Sitting in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looking on quietly, President Donald Trump launched into a tirade against mail-in voting. The outburst followed up on a social media post published earlier Monday morning in which Trump said he wanted to eliminate mail-in voting and promised a new executive order on the issue. Pamela Smith, CEO and president of Verified Voting, released a statement denouncing Trump’s rhetoric. “Elections in the United States are run by the states as an intentional protection in our Constitution to prevent concentrated executive power. No president has the authority to dictate how Americans vote. Most voters already vote with paper ballots,” Smith said. “Instead of undermining options like mail or early voting that already use paper ballots, the federal government should prioritize real solutions that would strengthen our elections, like expanding robust post-election audits, re-instating cybersecurity protections and ensuring the stable support and funding local election officials need to administer our democracy — a nonpartisan priority for everyone.” Trump himself voted by mail in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Read Article

National: ‘Profound harm’: Veterans blast Trump threat to mail-in ballots that could disenfranchise thousands of troops | Alex Woodward/The Independent

Donald Trump’s blanket attempt to “get rid” of mail-in ballots could disenfranchise thousands of American troops inside and outside the United States, a threat that military veterans and advocacy groups have condemned as the president’s latest attack on service members. On his Truth Social account Monday, Trump promised to “lead a movement” and sign an executive order that he claims would target the “completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” Nothing in Trump’s statements appeared remotely legal or constitutional but marked his administration’s latest attempts to restrict voting access and take federal control of election administration. Read Article

National: Trump vows to change how elections are run. The US Constitution doesn’t give him that power | Nicholas Riccardi and Ali Swenson/Associated Press

President Donald Trump on Monday vowed more changes to the way elections are conducted in the U.S., but based on the Constitution there is little to nothing he can do on his own. Relying on false information and conspiracy theories that he’s regularly used to explain away his 2020 election loss, Trump pledged on his social media site that he would do away with both mail voting — which remains popular and is used by about one-third of all voters — and voting machines — some form of which are used in almost all of the country’s thousands of election jurisdictions. These are the same systems that enabled Trump to win the 2024 election and Republicans to gain control of Congress. Trump’s post marks an escalation even in his normally overheated election rhetoric. He issued a wide-ranging executive order earlier this year that, among other changes, would have required documented proof-of-citizenship before registering to vote. Read Article

National: Trump’s proposed census changes could have lasting effects beyond elections | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

President Donald Trump wants to run a new census before next year’s midterms — and leave undocumented immigrants out of the count. That wouldn’t just reshape political maps. It would warp the data that governments, businesses, and researchers rely on for the work they do and the investments they make. An incomplete or rushed count means flawed decisions, with consequences that last far beyond one election. The census gives the government its most complete snapshot of the country. The federal government uses it to decide where to send billions of dollars for Medicaid, food assistance, school lunches, and disaster relief. States use it to plan hospitals and roads. Businesses choose store locations based on it. Public health officials track disease outbreaks with it, and emergency managers map evacuation routes using it. Even insurance companies rely on it to set rates. Read Article

National: Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over 2020 election claims | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

The conservative network Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of defaming a voting equipment company by spreading lies about President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, according to documents filed Monday. The settlement comes after Fox News Channel paid $787.5 million to settle a similar lawsuit in 2023 and Newsmax paid what court papers describe as $40 million to settle a libel lawsuit from a different voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, which also was a target of pro-Trump conspiracy theories on the network. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis had ruled earlier that Newsmax did indeed defame Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems by airing false information about the company and its equipment. But Davis left it to a jury to eventually decide whether that was done with malice, and, if so, how much Dominion deserved from Newsmax in damages. Newsmax and Dominion reached the settlement before the trial could take place. Read Article

National: Russia is quietly churning out fake content posing as US news | Dana Nickel/Politico

A pro-Russian propaganda group is taking advantage of high-profile news events to spread disinformation, and it’s spoofing reputable organizations — including news outlets, nonprofits and government agencies — to do so. According to misinformation tracker NewsGuard, the campaign — which has been tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center as Storm-1679 since at least 2022 — takes advantage of high-profile events to pump out fabricated content from various publications, including ABC News, BBC and most recently POLITICO. This year, the group has focused on flooding the internet with fake content surrounding the German SNAP elections and the upcoming Moldovan parliamentary vote. The campaign also sought to plant false narratives around the war in Ukraine ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday. Read Article

National: Mail-in voting is nothing new, just ask Civil War soldiers | Claire Barrett/Air Force Times

“We cannot have free government without elections,” President Abraham Lincoln reflected outside the White House on Nov. 10, 1864. “And if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” By the fall of 1864, the United States had been engulfed in a civil war for nearly 44 months, with “the bones of thousands of Northern boys [lying] in Southern graves or decayed unburied in the thickets and swamps of Dixie,” writes historian Gerald Swick. For Lincoln — and for the Union — the outcome of the 1864 presidential election hung in the balance. If voters rejected Lincoln, the war to save the Union would almost certainly be lost. According to Swick, Peace Democrats, Lincoln’s chief political opposition, wanted an end to hostilities immediately, under almost any circumstances. Read Article

 

Opinion: Would You Trust This Man With Your Elections? | Richard L. Hasen/The New York Times

With Republicans potentially losing their current seven-vote majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections (or, less likely, their six-vote majority in the Senate), President Trump has been sending clear signals of his intent to interfere with the fairness and integrity of those elections. The fear that Mr. Trump will try to subvert the 2026 elections is real — after all, he tried to overturn the results of the first presidential election he didn’t win. But even if Mr. Trump fails to keep the House and the Senate in Republican hands, he will have delegitimized future Democratic victories in the eyes of his MAGA base. Mr. Trump wants his supporters to believe that Democrats can win only by cheating. “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM,” he wrote in his Monday post. (Never mind that he raised his claim after he was apparently lectured on the supposed insecurity of mail-in ballots by the noted democracy enthusiast Vladimir Putin.) It’s a recipe for further polarization and, as someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit told The Times, “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” Read Article

Arizona voters caught up in state error should keep full voting rights, attorney general says | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona voters who were caught up in a state error tracking citizenship should keep their full voting rights, according to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. Her opinion, issued Monday, marks a turning point in the debate among officials over how to handle the eligibility of the roughly 200,000 voters, who were erroneously listed in state records as having provided proof of U.S. citizenship even though they hadn’t been asked to. Arizona requires such proof to vote in state and local elections, and counties have been sending notices to voters to try to collect the information. Mayes, a Democrat, said county recorders cannot legally suspend these voters’ registrations or make them eligible only for federal elections if they now fail to respond to these notices. Read Article

California: Money for Los Angeles County voting machines ended up in bribery ‘slush fund,’ feds allege | Rebecca Ellis and Richard Winton/Los Angeles Times

An election technology firm allegedly overbilled Los Angeles County for voting machines used during the 2020 election and funneled the extra cash into a “slush fund” for bribing government officials, federal prosecutors say in a criminal case against three company executives. Smartmatic, a U.K.-based voting system company, had bribery embedded as part of its business model, prosecutors allege in a Florida federal corruption case against company co-founder Roger Alejandro Piñate Martinez and two other company officials. Prosecutors do not indicate who benefited from the alleged pot of Los Angeles County taxpayer money. Dean Logan, the county’s top voting official, has acknowledged regularly meeting with Piñate, a Boca Raton resident who was charged last year with bribery and money laundering in the Philippines. Read Article

California’s long ballot count may be Trump’s next target in the war over voting | Adam Noboa/NBC

The latest salvo in President Donald Trump’s campaign against mail-in voting arrived Monday, as he announced he wants to “lead a movement” against mail ballots and advocate instead for in-person and paper ballots, which he says are “faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.” Trump has criticized mail-in ballots since their rapid rise in 2020, when after years of slower growth they exploded as a key innovation of the Covid election. But the logistics of counting mail-in votes helped keep the nation in suspense over who won for nearly four days after polls closed. This latest push by Trump may also have the convenience of being the latest line of attack in the redistricting wars. In California, state Democrats are attempting their own mid-decade gerrymander to counter the Trump-led push by Republicans to draw more friendly districts in Texas. And California sticks out as one of the most prominent embracers of mail-in voting — and among the slowest to count them. Read Article

Colorado: Trump again calls for release of ex-clerk guilty of election data breach | Rachel Leingang/The Guardian

Donald Trump again called for the release of a former election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in breaching election data in a quest to find fraud, threatening he would take “harsh measures” if she was not let out of prison. Peters was charged for allowing access to county voting equipment by an outside election activist, who was given security credentials under a different name. Materials and passwords were then published online on Telegram and on the rightwing outlet the Gateway Pundit. She was found guilty by a jury in Mesa county in 2024 of seven counts related to misconduct, conspiracy and impersonation, four of which were felony charges. She was sentenced later that year to nine years in prison. Her attorneys had argued for probation instead of prison time. Read Article

Georgia’s mass voter registration cancellation puts some registered voters at risk | Mark Niesse and Phoebe Quinton Phoebe Quinton/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Marcus Jacobs-King is a registered Georgia voter — for now. But he’s about to lose his ability to vote because he hasn’t cast a ballot in more than a decade. Jacobs-King is one of 478,000 people whose Georgia voter registrations are scheduled for cancellation this week because they haven’t participated in recent elections or moved away. “I’m concerned about it. Like most people, I want my voting rights and want to make a difference,” said Jacobs-King, a 35-year-old from Fairburn who works in the cargo industry. “In most cases, I was busy and had to do something and couldn’t get to vote soon enough.” Georgia’s mass cancellation of inactive voter registrations this year — one of the largest in U.S. history — targets people who likely moved away and didn’t vote in the last two general elections. But the cancellation effort comes with a risk that eligible voters could get swept up in the process. Read Article

North Carolina updates thousands of voter registration records to fix missing IDs | Gary D. Robertson/associated Press

Voter registration records for more than 20,000 people in North Carolina have been successfully amended thus far in an effort by election officials to add missing identification numbers. In mid-July, the State Board of Elections began formally an effort that seeks to resolve a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department that focused on voter registration records that lacked either a voter’s driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Federal and state laws have directed that election officials must request this ID information since 2004 of new registrants, but for about a decade the state’s registration form failed to make clear that voters were supposed to provide it if they had it. Read Article

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