Pennsylvania court says county should have warned voters before rejecting their mail ballots | Carter Walker/Votebeat

A Western Pennsylvania county that rejected hundreds of mail ballots in the April primary should have notified voters beforehand, a state appellate court ruled Tuesday. The ruling could add pressure on other counties to notify voters of errors with their mail ballots for the November election. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the Commonwealth Court agreed with a lower court judge that Washington County erred when it adopted a policy to reject mail ballots without telling voters and had a duty to inform them of their errors. “The current policy emasculates the Election Code’s guarantees by depriving voters … the opportunity to contest their disqualification or to avail themselves of the statutory failsafe of casting a provisional ballot,” Judge Michael Wojcik wrote for the majority. The decision applies to Washington County and does not set a statewide legal precedent, but county attorneys are likely to take note of the court’s opinion when advising their boards of elections about how to handle mail ballots with errors. Read Article

Wisconsin: Department of Justice sues 2 Rusk County towns over accessible voting machines | Mary Spicuzza Jessie Opoien/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued two northern Wisconsin towns accusing them of not having voting machines accessible to people with disabilities. The DOJ said it had reached an agreement with the Town of Lawrence to resolve its complaint, but not the Town of Thornapple. Both towns are in Rusk County. The complaint also said the State of Wisconsin failed to ensure every polling place within the state was accessible to voters with disabilities, as required by federal law. “Our democracy works when voters with disabilities have the right to vote on the same terms as any other voter. By failing to offer accessible voting systems, Thornapple and Lawrence shirked their responsibilities under the Help America Vote Act to provide equal access to the ballot for all voters,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. Read Article

Wisconsin Elections Commission spars over how absentee ballots must be returned on Election Day | Rich Kremer/WPR

During a sometimes tense meeting Tuesday, Republicans and Democrats on the Wisconsin Elections Commission battled over how absentee ballots from voters should get to clerks. The discussion stems from two complaints alleging clerks in Greenfield and Brookfield broke the law by requiring ballots to be delivered to the clerks’ offices rather than allowing voters to drop them off at their polling place. The clerks also ended drop-off times for absentee ballots before the close of in-person voting on election day. Draft memos from Wisconsin Elections Commission attorneys found the Greenfield and Brookfield clerks “abused” their discretion and didn’t follow state law, but because of a recent court ruling, the final decision had to come from the commission’s six-member board. Read Article

National: Russian threat groups shift attention to Harris-Walz campaign, researchers find | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

It took a little while for Russian influence operation peddlers to shift their attention from the Biden campaign to the Harris campaign, Microsoft said in a report published Tuesday, but now Kremlin-affiliated groups are ratcheting up fake videos about the Democratic presidential ticket. In late August and September, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center observed two separate Russian groups pushing videos designed to discredit Vice President Kamala Harris in places like a fake San Francisco news website and on the social media platform X. The phony videos claimed Harris was involved in a fabricated hit-and-run accident, depicted an attack by alleged Harris supporters on a purported Trump rally attendee and showed a fake New York City billboard making false claims about Harris’ policies. Read Article

Georgia: How the Election-Denial Mindset Works | Elaine Godfrey/The Atlantic

It’s normal, in September of an election year, for Anne Dover to feel stressed. This week, the 58-year-old elections director of Cherokee County, Georgia, has been drowning in absentee-ballot applications and wrangling new poll workers. What isn’t normal, though, is her looming sense of dread. What if this time, Dover sometimes wonders, things get even worse? Four years ago, when Donald Trump was seeding doubt about the election, Dover’s community outside of Atlanta came unhinged. People protested as she and her team met before certifying the county’s votes. They took photos of Dover’s car; they followed her home; they left threatening voicemails; someone even called in a bomb threat to her office. The protests didn’t make much sense—Trump had won Cherokee County by almost 40 points. But sense had nothing to do with it. “People just really were so unhappy about the results, and they thought they could bring about change by being vocal,” Dover, a Republican, told me. Read Article

National: Election officials prepare for threats with panic buttons, bulletproof glass | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The election director in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb where votes will be fiercely contested in this year’s presidential race, recently organized a five-hour training session. The focus wasn’t solely on the nuts-and-bolts of running this year’s election. Instead, it brought together election staff and law enforcement to strategize on how to keep workers safe and the process of voting and ballot-counting secure. Having a local sheriff’s deputy at early voting locations and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher are among the added security steps the office is taking this year. Read Article

National: Suspicious mail sent to election officials in multiple states | Maegan Vazquez and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

Federal authorities are investigating several suspicious pieces of mail sent to election officials in at least 17 states, some of which contained a questionable substance and led to building evacuations this week. An image of one of the suspicious pieces of mail, shared with The Washington Post by an election official in a battleground state, showed that the sender was listed as the “United States Traitor Elimination Army” and it had a return address originating in Maryland. The piece of mail, a large yellow envelope, was addressed to the Nebraska Elections Division. The FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said in a joint statement Tuesday that they are investigating what they referred to as “a series of suspicious mailings sent to election officials in several states.” Read Article

National: Russia goes all-out with covert disinformation aimed at Harris, Microsoft report says | Ali Swenson/Associated Press

The video was seen millions of times across social media but some viewers were suspicious: It featured a young Black woman who claimed Vice President Kamala Harris left her paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident in San Francisco 13 years ago. In an emotional retelling from a wheelchair, the alleged victim said she “cannot remain silent anymore” and lamented that her childhood had “ended too soon.” Immediately after the video was posted on Sept. 2, social media users pointed out reasons to be wary. The purported news channel it came from, San Francisco’s KBSF-TV, didn’t exist. A website for the channel set up just a week earlier contained plagiarized articles from real news outlets. The woman’s X-ray images shown in the video were taken from online medical journals. And the video and the text story on the website spelled the alleged victim’s name differently. Read Article

National: US Senate Warns Big Tech to Act Fast Against Election Meddling | Dell Cameron/WIRED

Top officials from Google, Apple, and Meta testified Wednesday before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee about each of their company’s ongoing efforts to identify and disrupt foreign influence campaigns ahead of the country’s November elections. The hearing, chaired by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, served largely to impress upon the companies the need for more extensive safeguards against the disinformation campaigns being funded by foreign entities with an eye on influencing US politics. “This is really our effort to try to urge you guys to do more. To alert the public that this has not gone away,” Warner said. Read Article

National: Trump’s Talk of Prosecution Rattles Election Officials | Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s escalating calls to investigate and prosecute election officials he sees as “corrupt” are sounding alarms among democracy experts and the local and state workers preparing to run elections and tally millions of votes across the country. In recent social media posts, Mr. Trump has said that election officials “involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” Read Article

National: House Defeats Spending Bill Tied to New Rules Requiring Proof of U.S. Citizenship to Register to Vote | Carl Hulse/The New York Times

The House on Wednesday defeated a $1.6 trillion stopgap spending bill to extend current government funding into March and impose new proof-of-citizenship requirements on voter registration, as Republicans and Democrats alike rejected Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposal to avert a shutdown at the end of the month. The bipartisan repudiation was entirely expected after several Republicans had made clear they would not back the spending plan and Democrats almost uniformly opposed the voting-registration proposal. The vote was 220 to 202, with 14 Republicans joining all but three Democrats in opposition. Two Republicans voted present. Read Article

National: In-person voting for the US presidential contest starts today in Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

The Democratic and Republican national conventions are just a memory, the first and perhaps only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is in the bag, and election offices are beginning to send out absentee ballots. Now come the voters. Friday is the start of early in-person voting for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, kicking off in Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota, the home state of Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz. The first ballots being cast in person come with just over six weeks left before Election Day on Nov. 5. About a dozen more states will follow with early in-person voting by mid-October. Read Article

Arizona: Errors in citizenship checks put 97,000 voters’ eligibility in limbo | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

The eligibility of nearly 100,000 registered voters in Arizona is up in the air because of an error in state systems uncovered just before the scheduled sending of mail ballots, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced on Tuesday. The state incorrectly marked these voters when they registered to vote as already having provided documented proof of U.S. citizenship, when really, it’s unclear whether they have, Fontes said. The error stems from the way the Motor Vehicle Division provides driver’s license information to the state’s voter registration system. The voters affected by this particular error are people who first obtained their Arizona driver’s license before October 1996 and then were issued a duplicate replacement before registering to vote sometime after 2004, according to Fontes. Read Article

Connecticut moves to upgrade voting tabulators | Mark Pazniokas/CT Mirror

Connecticut is entering a new era with the first early in-person voting in a general election and a nearly invisible and overdue technological change — the first, if limited, use of new tabulators that will count votes. Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas and Gov. Ned Lamont held a press conference Thursday to identify the nine cities and towns that will use the new tabulators in a pilot program before they become standard next year. The new polling place scanners and tabulators are made by Election Systems & Software. Read Article

In Georgia, a New Showdown Is Brewing Over Election Rules | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

A showdown is brewing between the top election official in Georgia and the State Election Board over more than a dozen new rules and procedures scheduled to be voted on by the board at a meeting on Friday. A lawyer for the election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, sent a scathing letter to the State Election Board on Monday, criticizing “the absurdity of the board’s actions” while warning that new rules under consideration are dangerously late in the election process and most likely illegal. Read Article

Illinois: Contractor’s unsecured databases exposed sensitive voter data in over a dozen counties | Andrew Adams/Capitol News Illinois

Around 4.6 million records associated with Illinoisans in over a dozen counties – including voting records, registrations and death certificates – were temporarily available on the open internet, according to a security researcher who identified the vulnerability in July. The documents were available through an unsecured cloud storage platform. They included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and voter registration history. Election security experts said the breach is unlikely to affect the upcoming election but could make affected individuals susceptible to identity theft. The researcher, Jeremiah Fowler, has also identified similar data vulnerabilities which exposed thousands of rail passengers’ travel details in the United Kingdom and over 4 million student records in the U.S., among others. Read Article

Minnesota’s top elections official says ‘glitch’ in automatic voter registration system is fixed | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

While there was a “glitch” in Minnesota’s new automatic voter registration system, Secretary of State Steve Simon said Thursday that nobody who was ineligible voted in the August primary as a result of the problem. That had been one of the questions that Minnesota Republicans last week said was still hanging after Simon and other state officials said they had made changes to the system after flagging around 1,000 potentially problematic registrations. Minnesota’s new system went live in April. Residents who apply for state-issued IDs such as driver’s licenses are now automatically registered to vote without having to opt in, assuming they’re eligible to vote. And 16- and 17-year-olds can preregister to vote once they turn 18. Read Article

Missouri Republican’s call to hand count ballots sparks alarm | Jonathan Shorman and Kacen Bayless/Kansas City Star

Dozens of election workers examining ballot after ballot, hour after hour. Unofficial results trickling in days after Election Day. If Republican Denny Hoskins wins the race for Missouri secretary of state in November, that scene may one day play out across the state. Hoskins, a state senator from Warrensburg who won his party’s nomination last month, wants to dump the ubiquitous electronic tabulators currently used by election officials in favor of hand counting every paper ballot – upwards of three million in a presidential election. The change would upend how Missourians experience elections, with voters enduring long waits before learning who won big races. Election authorities warn the move would impose substantial burdens, requiring them to hire more workers and delaying results at a time when many Republicans buy into false conspiracies surrounding election administration. Experts on election security say moving to hand counting would feed voter distrust and create periods of uncertainty over election outcomes that candidates or grifters could exploit. Read Article

Nebraska may change its electoral system at the last second to help Trump win | Stephen Marche/The Guardian

In one of those strange freaks of American politics, Nebraska has a split electoral college vote, and for the past few elections the city of Omaha has reliably voted Democrat. The other four electoral districts vote solidly Republican. Ordinarily, this little hiccup in the system wouldn’t matter much. But 2024 represents a uniquely precarious moment. As it stands, once you remove the settled Democrat and Republican states, the most direct path to a Kamala Harris victory is by way of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. With those three states, she would receive exactly 270 electoral college seats, the number she needs to win. In that case, she would win if, and only if, she holds that one electoral college vote in the congressional district of Omaha, Nebraska. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Republicans Try to Block Voters From Fixing Problems With Ballots | Maggie Astor and Neil Vigdor/The New York Times

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party are suing to try to stop election officials in the state from letting voters correct technical problems with their mail ballots. The Republican lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court against Secretary of State Al Schmidt and the state’s 67 county election boards, would also stop voters from being able to cast a provisional ballot if their mail ballot is rejected over a technical problem. More than half of states allow curing for some types of errors, such as a missing signature or date on a ballot envelope, or a signature that doesn’t match the one election officials have on file for the voter. Former President Donald J. Trump railed against the process as he falsely alleged election fraud in 2020 and tried to overturn his loss, and it has been a point of contention since then in Pennsylvania and in other states. Read Article

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