New Jersey: Strong criticism as ballot redesign bill advances | Colleen O’Dea/NJ Spotlight News

New design rules for New Jersey’s primary ballots got a step closer to enactment after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that some warn seeks to give some candidates an edge and could make the ballot more difficult for voters to read. Some of those who spoke during Thursday’s committee hearing complained that the bill (S-4142) could make it harder for voters to read ballots by removing the requirement that all ballots use a uniform font. That requirement is included in a version of the bill that passed the Assembly and was something ballot design experts argued for during a series of hearings by a special bipartisan Assembly committee. Read Article

North Carolina: Ghost in the machine: ‘Signature verification’ program for voters has reliability issues, report says | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

It was an experiment that cost over $450,000, mostly to pay for verification equipment for 10 counties. County boards incurred an additional $8,000. The time commitment varied from county to county. In Durham County, the most populous participant, the program took 80 staff hours. In smaller areas like Bertie and Cherokee counties, the job only took an hour or two. And the results are mixed. In Rowan County, for instance, the signature verification software reviewed 308 absentee ballots during the primary election. It spit out 24 as potential mismatched signatures. Read Article

North Carolina Supreme Court won’t fast-track lawsuit challenging 60K ballots in race for one of its own seats | Will Doran/WRAL

The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled Thursday that it won’t fast-track the lawsuit by the Republican candidate for a Supreme Court seat who’s trying to throw out the ballots of more than 60,000 voters in an attempt to reverse the 2024 election results. The decision could play a major role in who ultimately wins the seat. Republican Jefferson Griffin received 734 fewer votes than Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, recounts show. But the race hasn’t been certified as Griffin challenges the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters whom he says shouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the first place. Read Article

North Dakota lawmakers reject voter registration bill | Grant Coursey/The Bismarck Tribune

North Dakota lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to reinstate voter registration on Monday, Feb. 17, keeping the state the only one in the country without it — a distinction some said residents are proud of. House Bill 1287 would have brought statewide voter registration back to North Dakota for the first time since 1951, requiring voters to register with their local election precinct online or in person to be eligible to vote in all statewide special, primary or general elections. The bill received a 7-3 do-not-pass recommendation from the Government and Veterans Affairs Committee with four lawmakers absent/not voting and was defeated in the House with a vote of 75-15 with four lawmakers absent/not voting. Read Article

Pennsylvania Secretary of State says Pa. should replace its system for ‘early voting’ | Ford Turner/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The state’s top elections official on Thursday revisited one of the few headaches Pennsylvania had running the 2024 election — lots of people showing up before Election Day to do mail ballots in person — and said the system should be changed. Secretary of State Al Schmidt said it wasn’t true “early voting,” even though some people may have called it that. During a Senate budget hearing, Mr. Schmidt said other states carry out genuine early voting in less clunky fashion. “It really has put an incredible strain on our system at the county level,” Mr. Schmidt told lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee. County-level election staffers “spend the entire day processing in-person applications” and their other duties are neglected, he said. Read Article

Wisconsin Supreme Court Preserves Municipal Control Over Early Absentee Voting Sites | Rachel Selzer/Democracy Docket

In a 4-3 ruling, the Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed a right-wing legal challenge that sought to limit the authority of municipalities to designate early absentee voting locations and prevent future use of a mobile voting van deployed by the city of Racine during the 2022 election cycle. The majority opinion — from which all of the court’s conservative justices dissented — did not address the merits of the case, instead concluding that the individual plaintiff who sought judicial review lacked standing. Read Article

The elephant not in the room: Key cybersecurity agency is a no-show at gathering of election officials | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Secretaries of state and election officials from across the nation gathered at separate conferences this past week in Washington, where the new administration has been moving quickly to slash the federal workforce and dismantle certain agencies. One pressing question at the gatherings of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors was how the shift in power will affect collaborations with federal agencies that help safeguard elections, including the FBI, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. So far, it’s hard to tell. Read Article

National: SAVE Act Would Undermine Voter Registration for All Americans | Wendy R. Weiser and Andrew Garber/Brennan Center for Justice

Last month, congressional Republicans pledged to fast-track the SAVE Act, a bill that would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote. If enacted, it would devastate voter registration while disenfranchising tens of millions of eligible American citizens. More than 21 million American citizens don’t have these documents readily available, according to survey data. But the SAVE Act would likely adversely affect far more Americans than the data suggests. Many might not have noticed how broadly the bill could apply — its show-your-papers requirement is not just limited to new registrations but rather applies to every “application to register to vote,” which in many jurisdictions includes re-registrations and changes of address. And tens of millions of Americans register or re-register between every federal election. Read Article

National: CISA election, disinformation officials placed on administrative leave, sources say | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency placed several members of its election security group on administrative leave last week. According to one source, the moves happened Thursday and Friday of last week and were targeted at employees focused on CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation teams. The moves include four employees currently working on or assigned to the team, two more that left the team in the past four years but still hold positions at the Department of Homeland Security, and another two that work on elections misinformation or disinformation at DHS. A second source confirmed that some, but not all members of CISA’s election security team, were placed on leave last week. Read Article

National: Efforts to fight foreign influence and protect elections in question under Trump | Jenna McLaughlin/NPR

The new Trump administration is moving quickly to roll back long-standing work to counter foreign influence in U.S. elections, work that began in the first Trump term after revelations about the extent and ambition of Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election. Staffers working on countering foreign mis- and disinformation as well as a team of 10 regional election security advisers at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have been put on administrative leave, according to two sources directly familiar with the matter who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. In addition to the disruption to CISA’s work, Attorney General Pam Bondi also ordered an end to an FBI task force to combat foreign influence campaigns in American politics by Russia, China and other countries. Read Article

National: Ed Martin, Advocate of Jan. 6 Rioters, Now Runs Office That Investigated Them | Eileen Sullivan, Alan Feuer and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

Ed Martin was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, posting on social media that the violent riot that day was marked by “faith and joy.” He has often echoed President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, declaring on the night before the Capitol was stormed that “true Americans” should work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.” He has spent the past four years raising money for — and in some cases defending — people charged with joining the mob. And when the House committee that investigated Jan. 6 sent him a subpoena, he never complied, risking criminal charges. Now, Mr. Martin, 54, has been tapped by Mr. Trump to oversee the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington where he has been put in charge of dismantling the office’s signature project: the sprawling investigation of Jan. 6 that he has energetically opposed. Read Article

National: GOP laws aimed at very rare noncitizen voting could hit eligible voters | Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

Republicans in Congress and state legislatures are charging forward with plans to require Americans to prove they are citizens as they say they seek to crack down on noncitizen voting — an almost nonexistent problem. Voting by noncitizens is already illegal in all state and federal elections, and requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship could make it harder for millions of legitimate voters to cast ballots. Driver’s licenses and other state IDs can be used only for people who provided proof of citizenship to get those IDs, so some people will need to track down other documents. Many people do not have ready access to birth certificates or passports, including women who changed their names when they got married, rural residents who live far from government offices where birth records are kept, and people who lost documents in fires or floods. Read Article

National: With firings and lax enforcement, Trump moving to dismantle government’s public integrity guardrails | Eric Tucker, Michelle L. Price and Zeke Miller/Associated Press

In the first three weeks of his administration, President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely. In a span of hours on Monday, word came that he had forced out leaders of offices responsible for government ethics and whistleblower complaints. And in a boon to corporations, he ordered a pause to enforcement of a decades-old law that prohibits American companies from bribing foreign governments to win business. All of that came on top of the earlier late-night purge of more than a dozen inspectors general who are tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse at government agencies. It’s all being done with a stop-me-if-you-dare defiance by a president who the first time around felt hemmed in by watchdogs, lawyers and judges tasked with affirming good government and fair play. Now, he seems determined to break those constraints once and for all in a historically unprecedented flex of executive power. Read Article

National: Voting Rights Claims Plunge in Wake of Supreme Court Decision | Diana Dombrowski, Alex Ebert, and Kimberly Robinson/Bloomberg Law

After the Supreme Court weakened a key piece of the Voting Rights Act, voting discrimination cases are not just harder to bring to court but dramatically so, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis and experts who examined the findings. Section 2 of the act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting practices, was nearly 60% less likely to be cited following the court’s ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. The decision changed how courts consider whether a law or practice limits someone’s right to vote based on race. That finding aligns with voting rights groups and some attorneys’ concerns: Brnovich debilitated the most direct avenue to challenge voting discrimination and will have a lasting impact on voting rights. Read Article

Opinion: The New Authoritarianism – This isn’t single-party rule, but it’s not democracy either. | Steven Levitsky/The Atlantic

With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America. But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Read Article

Arizona proposal to speed up election results faces Hobbs veto threat | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Republican lawmakers in Arizona pledged after the November election to find a way to speed up election results, but it appears unlikely this year that they’ll send Gov. Katie Hobbs a bill that she would actually sign. The most likely alternative: Voters will see a related question on their ballot in 2026. Republicans have been moving ahead on the conventional legislative route. The Arizona House voted Tuesday to advance a bill, HB2703, that would rein in one major cause of vote-counting delays: the ability of voters to drop off their mail ballot at polling places on Election Day. That’s how nearly 1 in 10 Arizona voters cast their ballots last November, which meant election officials had to spend days afterward checking voter signatures on hundreds of thousands of ballot envelopes before they could be counted. The bill is likely to move to the Senate soon and the Senate president has introduced an identical bill, signaling this is likely to reach Hobbs’ desk soon. Read Article

Georgia: Removing QR codes from ballots could cost taxpayers $66 million | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia lawmakers are deciding whether to spend as much as $66 million to remove computer QR codes from ballots or abandon the idea in favor of a $15 million software update. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asked a Senate budget committee Wednesday to consider the less expensive option for the state’s 6-year-old voting equipment, manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. “This change would help ensure continued voter confidence without drastically changing the voting system,” Raffensperger said. “There had been some reports that said if we could update the software, that any potential vulnerabilities could then be sealed.” Read Article

Indiana: VR Systems’ exit from state leaves voting center plans up in the air | Dave Stafford/Brown County Democrat

Brown County’s plans to adopt voting centers for the 2026 election appears to be in jeopardy as one of the county’s suppliers of election equipment has given notice that it intends to cease doing business in Indiana. County officials said the supplier of electronic poll books for elections in Brown County and several other counties in the state, VR Systems, has informed them that they are discontinuing service in Indiana because it was no longer profitable. The Brown County Election Board discussed the situation Tuesday, and chairman Mark Williams said he plans to brief the Brown County Council at their meeting on Feb. 17. “We had a knuckleball thrown at us,” Williams said. Read Article

North Carolina: Like Trump, Jefferson Griffin May Be One Vote Away From Overturning a State’s Election Result | Billy Corriher/Democracy Docket

North Carolina’s highest court recently rejected Judge Jefferson Griffin’s request to bypass the lower courts and declare him the winner of last year’s state Supreme Court election, even though Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs received 734 more votes. But three of the seven justices signed on to a misleading concurring opinion implying — with zero evidence — that election fraud impacted the outcome. Like President Donald Trump in 2020, Griffin is seeking to overturn the results of an election that he lost. Trump’s election denialism was rejected by courts across the country — but in Wisconsin, Trump lost his baseless appeal to the state Supreme Court by just one vote. Judge Brian Hagedorn, a Republican appointee, voted with the liberals and authored a narrow 4-3 ruling to reject the conspiracy theories that formed the basis of Trump’s appeal. Read Article

Pennsylvania: It’s not illegal — and not uncommon – for voters to be registered in two states | Carter Walker/Votebeat

A conservative activist is claiming that Pennsylvania has “tens of thousands” of voters improperly registered, but state officials say he’s misrepresenting a normal, legal part of the voter registration system. The commonwealth regularly cleans its voter rolls to eliminate names of people who have moved out of the state or otherwise become ineligible. This process isn’t immediate. It can take several years, as counties are required to send voters notices to make sure they’re not improperly disenfranchised. All of this is regulated by federal and state law. But that hasn’t stopped Scott Presler from using these routine lags to suggest that something is wrong with voter registrations, Democratic ones in particular. Read Article

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