Nevada GOP asks poll observers to ensure voting machines are operating accurately – critics say it invites harassment against workers and sows distrust | Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

Republicans in Nevada are asking poll observers to complete a more than 15-item checklist on topics such as ensuring that voting machines are sufficiently secured and not connected to the internet, even though the poll watchers are not legally entitled to receive much of this information. State law does not explicitly give observers the right to seek much of the information on the checklists, such as inspecting the security of voting machines, receiving the serial numbers of the machines and accessing voting data at a polling location. Because election workers are not obligated to provide much of this information to observers and have many other responsibilities, critics worry that not doing so could increase harassment of election workers. “I am very concerned that this could happen, in terms of them following these individuals and harassing them and creating an unsafe environment based on this information,” said Sadmira Ramic, a voting rights attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada. Read Article

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Allows Provisional Votes After Mail Ballot Rejections | /Simon J. LevienThe New York Times

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that voters who submit mail-in ballots that are rejected for not following procedural directions can still cast provisional ballots. The decision is likely to affect thousands of mail-in ballots among the millions that will be cast in Pennsylvania, the swing state that holds the most electoral votes and is set to be the most consequential in the presidential election. The court ruled 4 to 3 that the Butler County board of elections must count provisional ballots cast by several voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for lacking mandatory secrecy envelopes. Read Article

Tennessee election officials iron out touch screen issues with unlikely tool: Coffee stirrers | hris Boccia/ABC News

An unexpected challenge in Tennessee’s first week of voting involved touchscreens in the state’s two largest counties resulted in no recorded irregularities and an unlikely fix: coffee stirrers that allow voters to choose with precision their preferred candidate. The stirrers, which since 2020 have been doled out to voters to use as styluses, were ditched for environmental reasons – then readopted after the first days of early voting led some Tennesseans to accidentally select their undesired candidate because of small boxes next to the candidates’ names. Some voters in Davidson and Shelby County, home to Nashville and Memphis, respectively, tried to pinprick that small box with their thumb or pointer finger, but – it being so near to the name of an opponent on a line above – they hit another candidate’s name. Read Article

Texas prepares for Nov. 5 with paper ballots and strengthened security | María Méndez/The Texas Tribune

Only six Texas counties will have in-person voters at the polls use direct-recording electronic, or DRE, voting systems that do not rely on paper ballots, according to Secretary of State data mapped by the group Verified Voting. Paper-backed systems have made a comeback among growing cybersecurity concerns, aging voting machines and changes following the 2020 election, said Mark Lindeman, Policy and Strategy Director of Verified Voting. “What makes the 2024 election fundamentally even more secure than the 2020 election is that almost everyone is voting on paper,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that nothing can go wrong. It means that even if things go wrong, the problems can be corrected.” This transition doesn’t mean voting machines are now “foolproof,” but “paper ballots can cut through a lot of the noise,” and concerns about election hacking, Lindeman added. Read Article

Virginia: Waynesboro Voters Sue to Ensure Election Officials Will Certify Election | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

Five voters in the city of Waynesboro, Virginia filed a lawsuit on Monday against the city’s Board of Elections Chairman Curtis Lilly and Vice Chairman Scott Mares to ensure they’ll certify the results of the upcoming election. The lawsuit comes after Lilly and Mares filed their own lawsuit saying that they will refuse to certify the upcoming general election unless the state’s policy prohibiting them from hand-counting ballots is changed. But the new lawsuit filed by the five Waynesboro voters argues that Lilly and Mares’ declaration to refuse to certify the election violates the Virginia Constitution and asks the court to order the Waynesboro Board of Elections to certify the election once the votes have been tabulated. Read Article

Wisconsin early voting slowed by label printing problems | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

Early voting kicked off in this battleground state this week with computer delays and long lines. Voters on Tuesday and Wednesday faced long waits as clerks tried to print labels with their names and addresses. The labels are affixed to the ballot envelopes that voters are required to use. Ordinarily, each label can be printed immediately. But since Tuesday, they have taken two minutes or longer to print, clerks said. Each delay causes a chain reaction that exacerbates the long lines. State election officials announced late Tuesday that the computer issues had been resolved but acknowledged Wednesday that the problems had recurred. They said the printing delays appeared to be part of an unspecified information technology problem affecting other government agencies as well. Read Article

Virginia: A lawsuit targeting voting machines could spoil election | Marc Fisher/The Washington Post

In a small Virginia city of 22,000 souls, a three-hour drive southwest from D.C. through pastoral countryside, a mechanical engineer and a bed-and-breakfast owner, worried about democracy, decided their duty as Americans was to throw a wrench in the works of the presidential election. Curtis G. Lilly II, the engineer, and Scott Mares, the innkeeper, are volunteer members of Waynesboro’s Board of Elections. In that role, they have filed a lawsuit announcing that they will refuse to certify the November vote because they believe only hand-tallied paper ballots — not voting machines — satisfy the state constitution’s ban on counting votes “in secret.” If Lilly and Mares don’t fulfill their obligation to certify Waynesboro’s votes next month, does that mean the city’s ballots won’t get counted? Will that gum up Virginia’s overall count as well? Lilly and his lawyer say they don’t know; that’s for a judge to decide. Read Article

Wisconsin voters are hearing a lot about noncitizen voting that rarely happens | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Melissa Kono had just finished a training session with a new Republican poll worker in 2014 when she asked the poll worker if she had any questions. “Her question was, ‘What do I do when all the Mexicans come in to vote?’” recalled Kono, the town clerk in Burnside, in western Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County. “And I was speechless, because I was like, that just doesn’t happen. There’s all this other stuff you should be asking questions about because it’s new to you … I was just flabbergasted by that comment.” Since then, as she trains poll workers and clerks across the state, Kono said she has seen the worry over noncitizen voting grow. At this point, she said, the baseless concern that noncitizens will vote en masse in the Nov. 5 presidential contest is the election conspiracy theory she hears about most from GOP poll workers and voters. The suspicion plays into growing doubts about the integrity of elections and century-old stereotypes of immigrants as criminals. GOP talking point on noncitizen voting permeates Wisconsin – Votebeat

‘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

Arizona’s mail ballot signature verification disproportionately affects new voters | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Nate Kennedy was in a hurry when he arrived at a Motor Vehicle Division office in 2021 to get his driver’s license. He’d just moved back from out of state and marked the box to register to vote, quickly scribbling his signature on the electronic pad. He was all set to become one of the thousands of voters not affiliated with a political party who would play a key role in determining the state’s leaders in the next midterm election. When he submitted his mail ballot in November 2022, however, that messy signature would cost him his vote. Election officials who compared the signature on his mail ballot envelope to the electronic scribble on file weren’t convinced they came from the same person. So, as the law requires, they rejected his ballot. He didn’t find out until weeks later. Read Article

Colorado voting machines not connected to the internet | Sara Wilson/Colorado Newsline

Most counties in Colorado have upgraded their voting systems equipment since 2020 to models that physically cannot connect to the internet, and those that rely on older machines are statutorily required to disable any wireless capability. Election officials say that even the older models do not create a vulnerability in the voting system, as some conservative politicians and activists claim. “This is a known thing amongst the counties and amongst the Secretary of State’s office — that the (wireless) card was physically present, and so that there’s a couple of steps that were taken to ensure that it wasn’t activated or present,” Boulder Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick, a Democrat, said. Read Article

Georgia judge blocks rule requiring counties to hand-count Election Day ballots | Adam Edelman/NBC

A Georgia judge on Tuesday blocked a new rule from the state’s election board that would have required counties to count ballots cast on Election Day by hand, a provision critics had said would cause delays and disruptions in reporting results in the battleground state. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his decision that the rule would be implemented too close to the election and that it would cause “administrative chaos” given the limited time available to train poll workers. “[T]he public interest is not disserved by pressing pause here. This election season is fraught; memories of January 6 have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy,” he wrote. Read Article

Georgia: County election board members must certify election results, a judge rules | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Certifying elections is a required duty of county election boards in Georgia, and they’re not allowed to refuse to finalize results based on suspicions of miscounts or fraud, a Fulton County judge ruled Tuesday. Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney rejected claims brought by Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, who voted against certifying this spring’s presidential primary. McBurney ruled that Georgia law requires certification and county election boards don’t have any discretion not to do so. “If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” McBurney wrote. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.” Read Article

Michigan judge says RNC suit challenging overseas voters could ‘disenfranchise an entire group of citizens’ | Josh Gerstein/Politico

A Michigan judge suggested Thursday that Republicans waited too long to file a suit challenging the right of some U.S. citizens who live abroad to vote in the swing state. During an hourlong hearing in Detroit, Judge Sima Patel said that delay and the proximity to the election were the “biggest hurdle” facing a suit the Republican National Committee and the Michigan Republican Party filed Oct. 8 to disqualify voters who registered in the state as the spouses or dependents of U.S. citizens living overseas. A Michigan law and guidance from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson allow a spouse or dependent accompanying a Michigan resident overseas to cast a ballot in Michigan, as long as they aren’t registered elsewhere in the U.S. Read Article

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