South Dakota: Bill banning tabulator machines fails in Senate panel | Gracie Terrall/KELO

South Dakota will still continue to use tabulator machines for election counting. In a 5-4 vote, the Senate State Affairs Committee deferred Senate Bill 217 to the 41st Day, effectively killing it. If passed, the bill would have prohibited all South Dakota counties from using automatic tabulator machines or electronic ballot marking systems when counting ballots during an election. The bill would have also suspended post election audits for counties. Read Article

Virginia: Bill would protect overseas service members from voter roll removal | Dean Mirshahi/VPM

The Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill that would keep state election officials from removing active-duty military members serving overseas from voter rolls. The proposal, introduced by Del. Amy Laufer (D–Charlottesville), would allow general registrars to only cancel voter registrations through a written request from the voter or data from an approved source. Laufer told a House subcommittee on Jan. 27 that the bill aims to protect military families overseas and other potential “vulnerable” voters from being improperly removed from the rolls. Read Article

Washington: Secretaries of State past and present question federal criticism of election integrity efforts: ‘The threats continue’ | Mitchell Roland/The Spokane Spokesman-Review

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs has written to the state’s congressional delegation expressing concerns about “federal support and efforts to counter election disinformation” state officials across the country can expect going forward. Hobbs’ letter, which he sent to members of Congress Wednesday, comes after the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reportedly placed 17 election officials on leave last week pending review. According to Hobbs, the election security advisor for Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington was among those placed on leave. “This abrupt move has left state and local election officials wondering: Who can we depend on to support election security now? Especially in light of the growing threats from cybercriminals and nation-state actors,” Hobbs said Wednesday. Read Article

Wisconsin’s top election official heads off Republican attempt to oust her | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

What happened? The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously ruled last week that the state’s chief election official, Meagan Wolfe, can stay in her job even though her term has expired, heading off a yearslong effort by some Republicans to oust her. The court found that although Wolfe’s term expired in 2023, the Wisconsin Elections Commission had no duty to reappoint or replace her, because her position isn’t vacant. What’s the dispute? Wolfe became the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s administrator in 2018 after working for the agency and its predecessor in other roles, and has been a holdover appointee since the summer of 2023. She is considered one of the most respected — and scrutinized — election officials nationwide, but she became a Republican target after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin in the 2020 election and took heat for the commission’s decisions in administering that election. Read Article

Wyoming: Bill requiring voters to use a pen-and-paper ballot passes House | Hannah Shields/Wyoming Tribune Eagle

Laramie County voters have used touch-screen voting machines in their local elections for years, but a bill passed by the Wyoming House of Representatives on Friday would require voters to use a paper ballot. House 245, “Pen and paper ballots,” requires all county clerks to set the default voting method to paper ballots, with an exception provided to voters who have a disability. Laramie County is the only one of Wyoming’s 23 counties to use touch-screen voting machines. Rep. Christopher Knapp, R-Gillette, the sponsor of the bill, said the state needs to have uniform election laws across all 23 counties. Secretary of State Chuck Gray previously expressed support for Knapp’s bill during a House Appropriations Committee meeting, saying he found Laramie County’s elections “unsatisfying.” Read Article

National: State and local governments should prepare for changes to CISA, cyber experts say | Sophia Fox-Sowell/StateScoop

Cybersecurity experts told StateScoop that state and local governments should brace themselves for changes to the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency under Kristi Noem, former governor of South Dakota, who was sworn in last weekend as the 8th secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Pamela Smith, CEO of Verified Voting, an organization that studies how technology impacts the administration of U.S. elections, said the loss of verified information monitoring may impact election security, which is managed by local government agencies. “CISA has a coordinating function. Their ability to monitor for mis- and disinformation campaigns that may be coming from outside the country, is probably greater than other agencies,” Smith told StateScoop in a recent interview. “It puts more pressure on the entities that have to deal with this, the election officials themselves, to monitor and quickly provide information.” Read Article

National: Attorney General Bondi ends FBI effort to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics | Ken Dilanian/NBC

In a little-noticed directive on her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a halt to a years-old federal law enforcement effort to combat secret influence campaigns by China, Russia and other adversaries that try to curry favor and sow chaos in American politics. Buried on the fourth page of one of 14 policy memos Bondi issued Wednesday, the order disbands the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and pares back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations involving disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat. Read Article

National: Federal Election Commission Chair Says Trump Has Moved to Fire Her | Chris Cameron/The New York Times

Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, said on Thursday that President Trump had moved to fire her. Ms. Weintraub, who has served as a Democratic commissioner on the bipartisan panel since 2002, posted a short letter signed by Mr. Trump on social media that said she was “hereby removed” from the commission effective immediately. She said in an interview that she did not see the president’s move as legally valid, and that she was considering her options on how to respond. “There’s a perfectly legal way for him to replace me,” Ms. Weintraub said on Thursday evening. “But just flat-out firing me, that is not it.” Read Article

National: Alarmed by Chinese hacks, Republicans mute attacks on cybersecurity agency | Joseph Menn/The Washington Post

President Donald Trump named the first director of the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2018 and fired him two years later, after he declared that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election wasn’t down to fraud. Ever since, Republicans have targeted the top U.S. cyberdefense agency for downgrades or deep cuts. In November, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who now leads the Senate committee overseeing CISA, even mused about killing it altogether. But with Trump back in office, the direst fates appear off the table. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, who oversees the agency, and other Republicans now say they see an essential mission in CISA protecting critical infrastructure from mounting ransomware and nation-state hacking attacks, especially those from the Chinese military and spies. Read Article

National: DOJ disbands foreign influence task force, limits scope of FARA prosecutions  | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

One of the first acts taken by Pam Bondi after being sworn in as attorney general was to disband an FBI task force that countered the influence of adversarial foreign governments on American politics. In a memo issued Wednesday, Bondi wrote that the Department of Justice would be shifting resources in its National Security Division, including disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, “to free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” Bondi’s memo also states that the Department of Justice will now only refer criminal charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act if they “alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” Read Article

National: Key Trump Cabinet members refuse to acknowledge Trump lost in 2020 | Patrick Marley and Colby Itkowitz/The Washington Post

Two of President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement nominees have been taking a new tack when talking about the 2020 presidential election: They’re not claiming Trump won that year, but they’re not saying he lost, either. Joe Biden was “duly sworn in” after the 2020 election, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, told senators at her confirmation hearing. “President Joe Biden’s election was certified, he was sworn in, and he served as the president of the United States,” Kash Patel, who has been tapped to lead the FBI, said at his confirmation hearing. Neither would say that Biden defeated Trump, despite dozens of court rulings that upheld the results. Read Article

National: CISA staffers offered deferred resignations with just hours to decide | Jenna McLaughlin/NPR

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, were initially excluded from broader government offers to take deferred resignation offers, in part due to their role in national security and defending critical infrastructure. However, on Wednesday, some CISA staffers were given the offer and just hours to decide whether to accept it, according to three sources who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity. Read Article

Opinion: Memory-Holing Jan. 6: What Happens When You Try to Make History Vanish? | Alec MacGillis/ProPublica

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. Read Article

Arizona election officials struggle to resolve proof-of-citizenship mixup | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Because of a 20-year-old government foul-up, about 200,000 Arizona voters will need to come up with proof of their citizenship soon in order to protect their full voting rights, and they might not even know about it yet. County officials waited six months for the Secretary of State’s Office to give them the final list of affected voters who need to be contacted, and clear legal guidance on how to do that so voters are treated fairly across the state. After all, in a few counties, the next elections are coming up in March or May. Read Article

Florida: Election supervisors say poll workers need to be shielded from harassment, threats | John Kennedy/Tallahassee Democrat

Following another bitterly contested campaign season, Florida election supervisors are renewing their call for more protections for poll workers harassed, threatened and insulted by a conspiracy-minded voting public. Supervisors presented a package of recommended changes Tuesday to the Senate Ethics & Elections Committee, topped by a request to exempt from public records the home addresses of election workers. Lake County Elections Supervisor Alan Hays, a former Republican state senator, told the panel that in his GOP-dominated county, his staff has been regularly subject to abuse from the public. Read Article

Georgia secretary of state wants easier access to immigration data to verify voter citizenship | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Monday asked the Department of Homeland Security to allow states and local election officials to use federal immigration data to conduct voter citizenship verification. In a letter addressed to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Raffensperger requested that state and local governments be allowed access to data from the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program, a service administered by DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that allows government agencies to check DHS’s immigration records, for a fee, to verify the citizenship or immigration status of applicants seeking benefits or licenses. Read Article

Michigan’s elections committee to be led by former clerk who believes 2020 was stolen | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

State Rep. Rachelle Smit, a former local clerk who believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen from President Donald Trump, will run the Michigan House’s committee on elections under the new GOP leadership. Smit, a Republican from Martin, was named the chair of the House’s Election Integrity Committee, as it has now been renamed. Her claims that the 2020 election was stolen have been roundly debunked but won her an endorsement from President Donald Trump, who praised her as someone “who knows our Elections are not secure, and that there was rampant Voter Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election.” Read Article

Nebraska: The GOP keeps failing to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state. Now it might ask voters to do it | Margery A. Beck/Associated Press

For decades Republicans in GOP-dominated Nebraska have tried and failed to upend the state’s unusual method of splitting its presidential electoral votes by congressional district. Now, with yet another winner-take-all bill likely to fail, they are proposing to put it to a vote of the people. The proposed referendum is billed as a backup plan to the winner-take-all measure, introduced at the request of Republican Gov. Jim Pillen, which appears to have little chance of surviving a promised filibuster. If it fails, Sen. Myron Dorn says he’ll seek to pull the referendum measure from committee in the hopes that voters will approve the change in the 2026 general election. Read Article

North Carolina: Federal Ruling Says State Courts Should Decide Election Case | Eduardo Medina/The New York Times

A federal appeals court said on Tuesday that the legal battle in North Carolina over a State Supreme Court seat should be decided in state court. The opinion from a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dealt a major blow to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, who narrowly won the seat in November but whose Republican challenger is seeking to flip the result. Justice Riggs had sought to have the issue resolved in federal court. Tuesday’s ruling means that her colleagues on the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Republican majority, may end up settling the dispute. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Fixing mail ballots cuts rejections. Not all counties allow it. | Carter Walker/Spotlight PA

Counties that allow mail voters to fix errors that could otherwise get their ballots disqualified rejected fewer ballots during the 2024 general election, a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis has found. Overall, just 0.57% of mail ballots statewide were rejected due to voter errors, such as an improper date, a missing signature on the return envelope, or failure to use the ballot secrecy envelope. That’s less than half the rejection rates of 1.22% in the primary election and 1.31% in the 2022 general election. However, according to the analysis, the rate was even lower in counties that allow voters to fix, or “cure,” their mail ballots — just 0.49% in those counties were rejected for technical deficiencies on average, compared with 0.59% in counties where curing isn’t allowed. The numbers mean 17% fewer voters had their ballots rejected in the curing counties. Read Article

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