Ohio: Trump’s Baseless 2020 Conspiracies Complicate Stark County’s Effort To Buy Voting Machines | Nick Castelle/NPR

A conspiracy theory sown by former President Donald Trump and his allies to cast doubt on his loss last year has trickled down to county-level politics, impeding one Ohio county’s ability to purchase new voting equipment ahead of local elections this year. The theory falsely claims voting machines made by a company called Dominion changed votes to swing the election in favor of now-President Biden. Multiple audits and recounts in states and counties that used the company’s equipment confirmed that the machines accurately recorded the vote totals last November. But those audits and recounts haven’t stopped Republican county officials in Stark County, Ohio, home to Canton, from slowing the procurement effort for new machines. Voters in the county twice voted for Barack Obama then twice — by double digits — for Donald Trump. The controversy started in December, when the bipartisan Stark County Board of Elections voted unanimously to replace its aging voting machines with new ones from Dominion. Since that vote, the county’s three top elected officials, all Republicans, say they’ve been getting an earful from voters.

Full Article: The Real World Impact Of A Voting Machine Conspiracy Theory : NPR

National: Dominion and Smartmatic have serious shot at victory in election disinformation suits, experts say | Tucker Higgins/CNBC

Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic USA have a good shot at winning their billion-dollar defamation suits against a host of conservative personalities and, in the case of Smartmatic, Fox News, but they still have a lot to prove in court, experts say. Each of the two election technology firms has sued several boosters of former President Donald Trump, saying that they worked to spread conspiracy theories about each company’s products in order to cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s electoral victory. Dominion launched its first salvo last month, suing Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, a conspiracy theorist and former lawyer for Trump’s campaign, in separate $1.3 billion suits brought in Washington, D.C., federal court. The company hit MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Monday with its latest suit, also calling for damages of $1.3 billion. Dominion CEO John Poulos warned the next day on CNBC that the Lindell suit is “definitely not the last.” Smartmatic has brought one case so far, in New York state court. The company sued Giuliani and Powell in addition to Fox News and its hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. Smartmatic has asked for a minimum of $2.7 billion from the defendants in that case. Dominion’s suits are before District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee. Smartmatic’s suit is before Judge David Cohen, a Democrat who was elected in November. While the sums are staggering, lawyers who have worked on defamation cases in the past say the companies have made a pretty good showing so far.

Full Article: Dominion and Smartmatic defamation cases are credible, experts say

Georgia’s election certification avoided an even worse nightmare that’s just waiting to happen next time | Andrew Appel/Freedom to Tinker

Voters in Georgia polling places, 2020, used Ballot-Marking Devices (BMDs), touchscreen computers that print out paper ballots; then voters fed those ballots into Precinct-Count Optical Scan (PCOS) voting machines for tabulation. There were many allegations about hacking of Georgia’s Presidential election. Based on the statewide audit, we can know that the PCOS machines were not cheating (in any way that changed the outcome). But can we know that the touchscreen BMDs were not cheating? And what about next time? There’s a nightmare scenario waiting to happen if Georgia (or other states) continue to use touchscreen BMDs on a large scale. There were many allegations about hacking of Georgia’s voting-machine computers in the November 2020 election—accusations about who owned the company that made the voting machines, accusations about who might have hacked into the computers. An important principle of election integrity is “software independence,” which I’ll paraphrase as saying that we should be able to verify the outcome of the election without having to know who wrote the software in the voting machines.

Indeed, the State of Georgia did a manual audit of all the paper ballots in the November 2020 Presidential election. The audit agreed with the outcome claimed by the optical-scan voting machines. This means,

  • The software in Georgia’s PCOS scanners is now irrelevant to the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia, which has been confirmed by the audit.
  • Georgia’s PCOS scanners were not cheating in the 2020 Presidential election (certainly not by enough to change the outcome), which we know because the hand-count audits closely agreed with the PCOS counts.
  • The audit gave election officials the opportunity to notice that several batches of ballots hadn’t even been counted the first time; properly counting those ballots changed the vote totals but not the outcome. I’ll discuss that in a future post.

Suppose the polling-place optical scanners had been hacked (enough to change the outcome). Then this would have been detected in the audit, and (in principle) Georgia would have been able to recover by doing a full recount.† That’s what we mean when we say optical-scan voting machines have “strong software independence”—you can obtain a trustworthy result even if you’re not sure about the software in the machine on election day.

Full Article: Georgia’s election certification avoided an even worse nightmare that’s just waiting to happen next time

Louisiana renews search for vendor to replace voting system | Melinda DeSlatte/Associated Press

Louisiana has resumed efforts to replace thousands of decades-old voting machines, with the state’s elections chief issuing a new solicitation for bidders Wednesday amid a political climate where such contracts are getting intensified scrutiny. Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin already was going to face strong interest in his search for a contractor to update Louisiana’s voting system because allegations of improper bid handling derailed a previous effort to replace the machines in 2018. But the Republican elected official’s vendor search is expected to draw heightened monitoring because of the national debate over the presidential election and baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud by former President Donald Trump and his supporters. Ardoin understands the timing isn’t optimal, but he said the bid solicitation has safeguards he hopes will reassure people. Louisiana’s “voting equipment has been around for almost 30 years now, and I just don’t know how much longer they can last without us having major issues. It’s time to do this,” Ardoin said in an interview with The Associated Press. “The timing may not be perfect, but it certainly gives the Louisiana people the assurance that I’m looking at it from the perspective of a secure, safe and transparent process and election system.” Louisiana’s current voting machine contractor, Dominion Voting Systems, has specifically been targeted by conservatives who claimed without evidence that its machines were easily manipulated and somehow to blame for Trump’s loss in other states. Trump won Louisiana’s electoral votes. Dominion has sued Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for spreading the unsubstantiated claims.

Source: Louisiana renews search for vendor to replace voting system

National: Dominion Voting Systems Threatens to Sue MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell | Maggie Haberman/The New York Times

Officials with Dominion Voting Systems have sent Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow, a legal letter warning of pending litigation over his baseless claims of widespread fraud involving their machines. “You have positioned yourself as a prominent leader of the ongoing misinformation campaign,” the letter said, referring to his continued false claims that their systems were rigged by someone to effect the outcome. “Litigation regarding these issues is imminent,” the letter said. Mr. Lindell is only the latest to get a warning letter from Dominion officials about potential litigation, after he and Sidney Powell, the right-wing lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani and others have continued to spread false claims about the integrity of the results the machines showed. Mr. Lindell visited Mr. Trump at the White House briefly on Friday, before the national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, steered him away. In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said he welcomed a lawsuit from Dominion. “I would really welcome them to sue me because I have all the evidence against them,” he said. “They sent this letter a couple of weeks ago. They’re lying, they’re nervous because I have all the evidence on them.”

Full Article: Dominion Voting Systems Threatens to Sue MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell – The New York Times

National: Dominion lawsuit could be just start of legal action against Trump allies | Tonya Riley/The Washington Post

Dominion Voting Systems is suing pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for more than $1.3 billion in damages, according a lawsuit filed in D.C. federal court by the company Friday. The company says that Powell has caused significant damage to its reputation and value by spreading unfounded conspiracy theories about it, including alleged ties to deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez and rigging the election for President-elect Joe Biden. The lawsuit is seeking an injunction to remove all of Powell’s statements determined to be false and defamatory. The unprecedented lawsuit could be just the first domino in a chain of lawsuits against Trump allies who have spread misinformation about voter fraud — possibly including Donald Trump himself. In its complaint, Dominion accuses Powell of working “in concert” with like-minded media outlets and allies. Dominion’s lawyer Tom Clare told reporters last week the lawsuit against Powell “is just the first in a series of legal steps.” (The lawsuit also names her law firm and the organization she set up to fundraise for her litigation.) Dominion sent more than 20 individuals and media companies retraction demands or letters last month asking them to preserve relevant evidence. The recipients included Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and pro-Trump news network One America News. Those requests are often a precursor to litigation. “To be clear, none of this would have been possible without other individuals and without other media outlets that have their own responsibility,” Clare said. “And we’re looking at all of them.”

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Dominion lawsuit could be just start of legal action against Trump allies – The Washington Post

Dominion sues pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, seeking more than $1.3 billion | Emma Brown/The Washington Post

Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a defamation lawsuit against lawyer Sidney Powell, demanding more than $1.3 billion in damages for havoc it says Powell has caused by spreading “wild” and “demonstrably false” allegations, including that Dominion played a central role in a fantastical scheme to steal the 2020 election from President Trump. For weeks, Powell has claimed that Dominion was established with communist money in Venezuela to enable ballot-stuffing and other vote manipulation, and that those abilities were harnessed to rig the election for former vice president Joe Biden. In a 124-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Dominion said its reputation and resale value have been deeply damaged by a “viral disinformation campaign” that Powell mounted “to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump.” The defendants named in the lawsuit include Powell, her law firm and Defending the Republic, the organization she set up to solicit donations to support her election-related litigation. In an interview, Dominion CEO John Poulos said the lawsuit aims to clear his company’s name through a full airing of the facts about the 2020 election. Poulos said he would like the case to go to trial rather than settle. “We feel that it’s important for the entire electoral process,” he said. “The allegations, I know they were lobbed against us . . . but the impacts go so far beyond us.”

Full Article: Dominion sues pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, seeking more than $1.3 billion – The Washington Post

National: Dominion Voting Systems CEO plans to sue Sidney Powell imminently | Joseph Choi/The Hill

Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos told Axios on Monday that his company plans on suing former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell imminently for defamation over her claims about its voting machines. “Our focus right now is on Sidney Powell, and there’s very good reason for that. She is by far in our opinion the most egregious and prolific purveyor of the falsities against Dominion. Her statements have caused real damage. They’re demonstrably false,” Poulos said. Powell, formerly part of President Trump‘s team seeking to overturn the 2020 election, has baselessly claimed that Dominion’s algorithm flipped votes and that the company paid Georgia GOP officials to stay quiet on the alleged scheme. “We were originally quiet and we sat back as a company,” he added. “Because our hope was that all of these claims would be filed in a process in court where procedure and evidence is important. And it’s become clear to us that there is absolutely no interest to reveal this evidence because we know it doesn’t exist. And there’s no effort to actually put it in front of the court proceedings so that these allegations and all of the evidence can follow a proper process and be litigated right to the end.” When asked by Axios’s Dan Primack when the lawsuit would be filed, Poulos said, “It’s imminent.” A Dominion spokesperson speaking to The Hill confirmed that a lawsuit would be filed, possibly as soon as this week.

Full Article: Dominion Voting Systems CEO plans to sue Sidney Powell imminently | TheHill

National: Dominion Voting Systems demands pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell retract ‘defamatory’ accusations | Jonathan Easley/The Hill

Attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems sent a letter to Sidney Powell, a onetime member of President Trump’s legal team, demanding she retract her claims that the voting machine company helped rig the 2020 election. The letter, from the Alexandria, Va.-based law firm Clare Locke, warns Powell that she will expose both herself and the Trump campaign to “substantial legal risk for defamation” if she refuses to publicly recant the many unsubstantiated claims she has made about the company. “As a result of your false accusations, Dominion has suffered enormous harm, and its employees have been stalked, have been harassed, and have received death threats,” the letter states. “We demand that you immediately and publicly retract your false accusations and set the record straight. If you refuse to do so and instead choose to stand by your defamatory falsehoods, that will be viewed as additional evidence of actual malice.” Powell has been among the most vocal and active proponents of allegations — none of which have held up in court — that the election was stolen from Trump through widespread fraud and corruption. Powell has claimed that Dominion used an algorithm to flip some votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. She has also claimed that Dominion paid kickbacks to GOP officials in Georgia and elsewhere to keep quiet about the scheme, among many other allegations.

Full Article: Dominion voting machines demands pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell retract ‘defamatory’ accusations | TheHill

National: Voting machine firm demands pro-Trump attorney retract bogus claims about 2020 election | Olivia Rubin and Matthew Mosk/ABC

The Colorado voting machine company that fringe pro-Trump forces have targeted with dark conspiracy theories of a rigged 2020 election is demanding that conservative lawyer Sidney Powell retract the “wild, knowingly baseless, and false” allegations she has made against them. Dominion Voting Systems made their demands in a letter to Powell, who has taken a central role in pushing the debunked theory that dark forces rigged Dominion machines to flip votes from Trump to former Vice President Joe Biden. The company’s letter represents its most aggressive posture to date, and signals the early stages of what could become heavy and costly pushback against the lawyers who have led a post-election campaign to discredit the 2020 election results. Pro-Trump attorneys have filed more than 60 lawsuits as part of the effort, nearly all of which have been dismissed, often with sharply-worded rulings. Despite having been repeatedly disputed by the company and disproven by federal election officials, the bogus conspiracy theory has spread fast and wide on social media and in conservative media outlets.

Full Article: Voting machine firm demands pro-Trump attorney retract bogus claims about 2020 election – ABC News

Michigan: Trump attorney: ‘Our team’ examining Antrim voting equipment | Paul Egan/Detroit Free Press

President Donald Trump’s legal team is examining and taking images from 22 vote tabulators in Antrim County Sunday morning after a judge issued an order later Friday, a Trump attorney said. “A judge actually granted our team access … for us to conduct a forensic audit,” Trump attorney Jenna Ellis told Fox News on Sunday. Antrim County is solidly Republican but its unofficial results initially showed Democrat Joe Biden winning more votes on Nov. 3 than Trump did. The results were soon corrected and county and state officials have said the initial reporting inaccuracies were due to programming errors by the Republican clerk and not due to errors by the Dominion Voting Systems election equipment or related software. “That was an unexplained and so-called glitch,” said Ellis, an attorney who has been prominent in the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn election results that show Biden won the presidency. “So our team is going to be able to go in there this morning and we’ll be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and we’ll have the results in about 48 hours and that will tell us a lot about these machines.”

Full Article: Trump attorney: ‘Our team’ examining Antrim voting equipment

California: Some Oakland ballots not counted, civil rights groups say | John Myers/Los Angeles Times

A coalition of civil rights and voting advocacy groups lashed out Friday at Alameda County election officials after poll workers wrongly told more than 150 voters that their paper ballot was only a receipt and that it could be taken home, leading to the votes not being counted. The mistake, the groups allege, affected voters who visited one or more locations in Oakland to cast ballots in person between Oct. 31 and election day. “We spoke to some of the poll workers there who were really alarmed,” said Angelica Salceda, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. The voting rights advocates said that some voters who showed up at a polling place on the campus of Mills College during the four-day period were told the ballot marking device they had used was keeping a digital record of their selections on federal, state and local races. In reality, the device only makes marks on a paper ballot, which the voter then must submit to an election official. Instead, poll workers “incorrectly told voters … that the printouts from the machines were ‘receipts’ that the voters should take with them, rather than official ballots that they should deposit in the ballot box,” representatives of 15 civil rights and voting rights groups wrote in a letter Thursday to Tim Dupuis, the Alameda County registrar of voters. “In general, voters who cast their ballots at Mills College were disproportionately Black, and many of the voters who had been actively encouraged by poll workers to use the [ballot marking devices] were disabled or elderly.”

Full Article: Some Oakland ballots not counted, civil rights groups say – Los Angeles Times

National: Giuliani adds fuel to discredited theories about voting machines. | Zach Montague/The New York Times

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, continued on Saturday his effort to delegitimize votes cast through electronic voting machines, citing several conspiracies connected to the companies that make the machines and the software they run in a post on Twitter. Looking to sow doubt about the vote count in multiple swing states that were recently called for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Giuliani hinted support for a discredited theory that one of the companies that manufactures the voting machines used in some states, Smartmatic, is controlled by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. “Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?” Mr. Giuliani wrote. “It will all come out.” Hours later, President Trump picked up a similar refrain, stating in a tweet that the election was “stolen” by “privately owned Radical Left company, Dominion,” without providing evidence or explaining why Dominion was distinct among the many other privately owned election system vendors that routinely administer elections in the United States. Speculation that Mr. Soros has any influence over Smartmatic or its operations has been thoroughly debunked, and he does not own the company. Mr. Soros’s distant connection to the company is through his association with Smartmatic’s chairman, Mark Malloch-Brown, who is on the board of Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundation.

Full Article: Giuliani adds fuel to discredited theories about voting machines. – The New York Times

National: No, Dominion voting machines did not cause widespread voting problems. | Jack Nicas/The New York Times

President Trump on Thursday spread new baseless claims about Dominion Voting Systems, which makes software that local governments around the nation use to help run their elections, fueling a conspiracy theory that Dominion “software glitches” changed vote tallies in Michigan and Georgia last week. The Dominion software was used in only two of the five counties that had problems in Michigan and Georgia, and in every instance there was a detailed explanation for what had happened. In all of the cases, software did not affect the vote counts. In the two Michigan counties that had mistakes, the inaccuracies were because of human errors, not software problems, according to the Michigan Department of State, county officials and election-security experts. Only one of the two Michigan counties used Dominion software. Issues in three Georgia counties had other explanations. In one county, an apparent problem with Dominion software delayed officials’ reporting of the vote tallies, but did not affect the actual vote count. In two other counties, a separate company’s software slowed poll workers’ ability to check-in voters. “Many of the claims being asserted about Dominion and questionable voting technology is misinformation at best and, in many cases, they’re outright disinformation,” said Edward Perez, an election-technology expert at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that studies voting infrastructure. “I’m not aware of any evidence of specific things or defects in Dominion software that would lead one to believe that votes had been recorded or counted incorrectly.”

Full Article: No, Dominion voting machines did not cause widespread voting problems. – The New York Times

Georgia: Trump campaign seeks hand recount, could get it | Jeff Amy and Kate Brumback/Associated Press

Republicans are making more demands of Georgia’s chief elections officer as they seek to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 12,000-vote lead in the state’s presidential race. U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, who’s leading President Donald Trump’s recount team in Georgia, and state Republican Party Chairman David Shafer sent a letter to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Tuesday requesting that he order a hand recount of Georgia’s nearly 5 million ballots before certifying the results. The move comes a day after Republican U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler called for Raffensperger’s resignation, claiming he ran the election poorly but citing no specific incidents of wrongdoing. Perdue will face Democrat Jon Ossoff and Loeffler will face Democrat Raphael Warnock in Jan. 5 runoffs that are likely to determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. Raffensperger has refused to step down and defended how his office conducted the election. His office has refuted a number of claims made by Trump supporters. “The process of reporting results has been orderly and followed the law,” Raffensperger said in a Monday statement. “Where there have been specific allegations of illegal voting, my office has dispatched investigators.”

Full Article: Trump campaign seeks hand recount in Georgia, could get it

Michigan: Failure updating software caused Antrim County vote glitch | Paul Egan/Detroit Free Press

A failure to properly update software was the reason for a computer glitch that caused massive errors in unofficial election results reported from Antrim county, the Michigan Department of State said late Friday. And a U-M professor of computer science and engineering who specializes in voting systems and securities says it appears the snafu arose from an “unusual sequence of events very unlikely to affect any other jurisdictions.” … J. Alex Halderman, the U-M professor and voting systems expert, said he has looked into the incident and determined that the problem arose because Antrim officials made a mistake before the election when they loaded a new version of the “election definition” — the data that is similar to a spreadsheet describing the races and candidates on the ballot. According to the state, the new “election definition” was loaded in October after county officials learned of two local races in which ballot information had to be updated. County officials correctly loaded the new version onto the scanners for the affected precincts, but left the old version on scanners for precincts where the ballot was not affected by the late change, Halderman said. So although the scanners in the tabulators counted all the votes in each precinct correctly, the different versions of the ballot resulted in problems and erroneous vote totals when the precinct results were combined in the election management system, a separate software package used to manage and consolidate results before they are reported to the state, he said. “Since the scanners … used slightly different election definitions, some of the positions didn’t line up properly,” Halderman said. “As a result, when the results were read by the election management system, some of them were initially assigned to the wrong candidates.”

Full Article: Michigan: Failure updating software caused Antrim County vote glitch

Michigan: State election agency says failure to update software caused Antrim County election glitch | Paul Egan/Detroit Free Press

A failure to update software was the reason for a computer glitch that caused massive errors in unofficial election results reported from Antrim county, the Michigan Department of State said late Friday. “The erroneous reporting of unofficial results from Antrim county was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County clerk,” the state agency that oversees elections said in a news release. There was no problem with the voting machines or vote totals, which were preserved on tapes printed from the tabulators, the state said. The problem occurred when the totals by precinct were combined into candidate county-wide totals for transfer to the state, using election management system software, the state agency said in a news release. “All ballots were properly tabulated. However, the clerk accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results.” State officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether they track when and how local officials update their election-related software or whether local officials are required to report needed updates to the state, once they are completed.

Full Article: State: Failure to update software caused Antrim vote glitch

National: Forget Hanging Chads. Copyright Laws Could be the Next Electoral Quagmire. | Isabella Farr and Olivia Reingold/Politico

If you used a mail-in ballot in Fulton County, Georgia this year, you may have noticed peculiar language at the top of the ballot: “Copyright © 2020 Dominion Voting Inc.” Dominion Voting is a private company that sells election technology. And this ballot design — which was created by Dominion and counted using the company’s proprietary equipment — is technically its intellectual property.Unusual as it may seem, this isn’t uncommon: Most voting technology used throughout the U.S. is covered by intellectual property law. That means the touch-screen you might have tapped on to vote could be patented. The software used to process your vote could be copyrighted. Before you even got to the voting booth, your ballot was likely designed on copyrighted software. And all of it could cause a nightmare after Nov. 3, according to election-security experts. “We’re going to wind up with a thousand court cases that cannot just be resolved by just going into the software and checking to see what happened, because it’s proprietary,” said Ben Ptashnik, the co-founder of the National Election Defense Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group that pushes Congress to reform election security.

Full Article: Forget Hanging Chads. Copyright Laws Could be the Next Electoral Quagmire. – POLITICO

Arizona: No truth to GOP claims that Sharpies are invalidating ballots | Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/AZ Mirror

For the first time ever, Arizona voters were given Sharpie permanent markers to mark their ballots at Arizona polls this year, and they have spawned false claims from Republican officials in Arizona and members of the state’s conservative fringe that election officials are using the markers to invalidate votes for Donald Trump and other GOP candidates.  Similar claims have been made by prominent people in the national conservative sphere, including Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Sean Davis, the co-founder of the right-wing Federalist news site. Elected Republicans in Arizona have made similar claims. U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, no stranger to fringe conspiracy theories, called it “voter fraud” and urged Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate. Rep. Warren Petersen, the GOP leader in the state House of Representatives, alleged that some of his constituents had their votes “cancelled” without explanation and said he referred them to the AG; he later shared a news story alleging malfeasance with the Sharpies. And state Rep. Bret Roberts said anyone who used a Sharpie to mark their ballots should ensure it was counted. … “To me it smacks of grandstanding and politics,” former state Elections Director Amy Chan said, adding that she is concerned the AG’s request is also coming from a place of fundamental misunderstanding, as voters have for years been told that Sharpies and similar markers were not to be used on ballots because the old machines couldn’t read them. 

Full Article: No truth to GOP claims that Sharpies are invalidating Arizona ballots

Georgia election official: Machine glitch caused by last-minute vendor upload | Kim Zetter/Politico

A technology glitch that halted voting in two Georgia counties on Tuesday morning was caused by a vendor uploading an update to their election machines the night before, a county election supervisor said. Voters were unable to cast machine ballots for a couple of hours in Morgan and Spalding counties after the electronic devices crashed, state officials said. In response to the delays, Superior Court Judge W. Fletcher Sams extended voting until 11 p.m. The counties use voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and electronic poll books — used to sign in voters — made by KnowInk. The companies “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch,” said Marcia Ridley, elections supervisor at Spalding County Board of Election. That glitch prevented pollworkers from using the pollbooks to program smart cards that the voters insert into the voting machines. Ridley said that a representative from the two companies called her after poll workers began having problems with the equipment Tuesday morning and said the problem was due to an upload to the machines by one of their technicians overnight.

Full Article: Georgia election official: Machine glitch caused by last-minute vendor upload – POLITICO

National: Early Voting Shines Spotlight on Consolidated Voting-Equipment Market | Chris Cumming/Wall Street Journal

Leveraged-buyout firms are playing a key role in the 2020 elections: Companies they own are counting the flood of mail-in ballots, and that isn’t sitting well with some lawmakers. Two private-equity-owned companies dominate the market for high-speed ballot scanners and other voting equipment. Lawmakers have raised questions about the lack of transparency and competition in the industry, and more broadly over the role of private-equity firms in elections. Election Systems & Software LLC and Dominion Voting Systems Corp. together produce the technology used by over three-quarters of U.S. voters, according to a coming report by researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The third-largest player, Hart InterCivic, was owned by private-equity firm H.I.G. Capital from 2011 to this April, when it was quietly sold, according to H.I.G. Private-equity firms “have taken over nearly all of the nation’s election technology—and how they do business is clouded in secrecy,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in an email. Lawmakers including Sens. Warren and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) in December wrote that the private-equity-backed voting companies’ lack of transparency threatens the integrity of elections. Under private-equity ownership, the voting-machine market has consolidated through mergers. In a little over a decade, at least eight major vendors have consolidated to three, which control about 92% of the market, Wharton researchers said in 2017.

Full Article: Early Voting Shines Spotlight on Consolidated Voting-Equipment Market – WSJ

Georgia: Appeals court halts order requiring paper pollbook backups | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

A federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily halted a lower court’s order that said every polling place in Georgia must have at least one updated paper backup of the electronic pollbooks that are used to check in voters.U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg last month issued the order requiring the backup and other measures amid the context of a broader lawsuit filed by voting integrity activists that challenges Georgia’s voting system. She called the order “a limited common sense remedy” to impediments voters have faced.The state appealed the order to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel of the appeals court voted 2-1 to stay Totenberg’s order while the appeal is pending.The voting integrity activists had asked Totenberg to order the paper backup. They had argued that malfunctioning electronic pollbooks created bottlenecks that resulted in voters waiting in long lines during the state’s primary election in June and runoff election in August.The KnowInk PollPads are part of the new election system the state bought last year from Dominion Voting Systems for more than $100 million.Totenberg’s ruling required Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, to generate and provide election superintendents in each county a list of electors updated at the close of the in-person early voting period to contain all the information in the electronic pollbook. The secretary of state was then to instruct the election superintendents to provide at least one paper backup at each polling place on Election Day.

Georgia: In high-stakes election, State’s voting system vulnerable to cyberattack | Alan Judd/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Headed into one of the most consequential elections in the state’s history, Georgia’s new electronic voting system is vulnerable to cyberattacks that could undermine public confidence, create chaos at the polls or even manipulate the results on Election Day. Computer scientists, voting-rights activists, U.S. intelligence agencies and a federal judge have repeatedly warned of security deficiencies in Georgia’s system and in electronic voting in general. But state officials have dismissed their concerns as merely “opining on potential risks.”Instead, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office weakened the system’s defenses, disabling password protections on a key component that controls who is allowed to vote. In addition, days before early voting began on Oct. 12, Raffensperger’s office pushed out new software to each of the state’s 30,000 voting machines through hundreds of thumb drives that experts say are prone to infection with malware. And what state officials describe as a feature of the new system actually masks a vulnerability. Officials tell voters to verify their selections on a paper ballot before feeding it into an optical scanner. But the scanner doesn’t record the text that voters see; rather, it reads an unencrypted quick response, or QR, barcode that is indecipherable to the human eye. Either by tampering with individual voting machines or by infiltrating the state’s central elections server, hackers could systematically alter the barcodes to change votes.

Georgia election chief says tech issues resolved as turnout soars | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that problems with a sluggish voter check-in system have been resolved and wait times have fallen as early voting turnout surges in Georgia. Voters should expect a smooth early voting process after technical changes were made last week to the state computer system that looks up voter registration and check-in information at polling places, he said. “When we saw an issue with speed of the voter registration, we jumped on it because we knew it would impact the voter experience, so we handled that very quickly,” Raffensperger said during a press conference at the state Capitol. “That solution has all been handled.”The technical difficulties of the system, called eNet, resulted in slow-moving lines, with some voters waiting 12 hours on the first day of early voting last week.

Georgia’s new touchscreen voting system survives court challenge | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A federal judge has once again denied an effort to throw out Georgia’s touchscreen voting computers because of election security concerns. Her decision came late Sunday, just hours before the start of early voting.U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg ruled against switching the state to paper ballots filled out by hand. She wrote that it was too late to make such a sweeping change that would disrupt the election as tens of thousands of voters are expected to go to the polls. Georgia’s new $104 million voting system adds paper ballots to the voting process for the first time in 18 years. Voters will make their choices on touchscreens connected to printers that will produce paper ballots. Totenberg criticized state election officials for problems with voting equipment during this year’s primary elections but acknowledged that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that courts must exercise restraint in changing procedures near an election.

Georgia: Technical breakdown hangs over Georgia early voting | Brad Schrade and Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The first week of early voting once again tested Georgia’s voting system, and technical breakdowns and long waits returned. An overloaded statewide voter registration system, combined with high turnout, created long lines of frustrated voters, raising questions with two weeks of early voting remaining: Have the problems been solved, or was last week a precursor to larger challenges as Georgia races toward a Nov. 3 Election Day that is expected to be like no other?By late Friday, the office of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, couldn’t assure voters that the problem was fully fixed. His office could offer no details about the nature of a bandwidth problem that reportedly caused the delays. They said they had worked with their vendor, Civix, to expand the system’s capacity.

Georgia: Extreme voting lines expose where Georgia primary failed | Mark Niesse and Nick Thieme/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The last polling place in Georgia closed well after midnight. Voters had waited over five hours at Christian City, an assisted living community south of Atlanta. The line twisted far down the street, the most egregious example of extreme delays to participate in Georgia’s troubled primary. A new trove of elections data shows which voting locations stayed open late, highlighting where voters suffered the longest lines at Georgia’s 2,300 polling places. The secretary of state’s office reported the information to county election officials so they can make improvements before November’s high-turnout presidential election. About 11% of voting sites in Georgia closed over an hour late, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of the elections data. The epicenter of voting problems was Fulton County, where more than three-quarters of polling places closed after 8 p.m. Black voters bore the brunt of long lines and late closings in overcrowded, understaffed and poorly equipped polling places. Only 61% of majority Black precincts closed on time compared with 80% of mostly white precincts, the AJC’s analysis found. Georgia’s election day was a debacle created by the coronavirus pandemic, high turnout and difficulties operating new voting computers. Precincts closed, poll workers quit and social-distancing restrictions limited the number of people who could vote at a time.

Georgia: Questioning State Elections Officials, Lawmakers Express Concerns Over November Vote | Emil Moffatt/WABE

Five million Georgians are expected to vote in November, an election that will come less than five months after the state experienced a bumpy primary. Amid a global health pandemic, the state rolled out its new voting system statewide for the first time on June 9. The result: many voters had to wait in lines for hours as poll workers – some of them brand new – sorted out technical problems. “We think the most important thing, obviously is training, training and re-training,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as he spoke in front of the House Governmental Affairs Committee. “And having more techs [technical support personnel] in there so that any issues that do pop up can be really handled expeditiously so that we have an improved result in November.” Raffensperger pledged to have technical support at every precinct in November, something that wasn’t there in June. Tuesday’s meeting started an hour late because House members were still across the street voting on a hate crimes bill which had been passed by the Senate just a short time before. And when the meeting started, Raffensperger made only a brief statement and took a handful of questions, citing other obligations. That didn’t sit well with House Minority Leader Bob Trammell, who said he wanted to hear more from the state’s top election’s official. “I would point out that voters often waited in line for hours, and the secretary was here for 20 minutes,” said Trammell.

Georgia: How Electronic Voting in Georgia Resulted in a Disenfranchising Debacle | Sue Halprin/The New Yorker

No one familiar with Georgia’s record of election administration was surprised to see another train wreck unfold during Tuesday’s primary. Lines were so long that some voters waited seven hours to vote. It was a monumental failure that—not surprisingly—occurred in predominantly African-American and poor neighborhoods. Part of the problem was the use of expensive, new voting machines, which could signal problems for the Presidential election, in November. On Tuesday, Georgians voted using thirty thousand new machines, called Ballot Marking Devices (B.M.D.s), which the state purchased last year for a hundred and seven million dollars, despite public opposition. When voters finally made it to the front of the line, they signed into electronic poll books (many of which malfunctioned) and were given a smart card loaded with the ballot for their district. They then inserted the card into the voting machine, the ballot popped up on a touch screen, they made their selections, and the machine printed out a summary of those choices.

Georgia: Elections head seeks changes to avoid lines in November | Mark NiesseBen Brasch/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Calls for monumental changes to Georgia’s elections arrived Wednesday, with elected officials from both parties demanding more voting locations, shorter lines and a management overhaul in Fulton County, where voters experienced the longest waits. The proposals came after a debacle in Georgia’s June 9 primary that left some voters in line for hours because of precinct closures, voting machine problems and complications stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.These efforts are meant to avoid a repeat of those issues in November’s presidential election, when three times as many in-person voters are expected. Turnout could exceed 5 million voters. In separate events, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Democratic legislators from Fulton heaped blame Wednesday on the county’s elections office. Fulton voters crammed into precincts with few voting machines and a shortage of trained poll workers. Other parts of the state also had problems, especially in densely populated areas with high turnout, but 70% of the problems statewide occurred in Fulton, Raffensperger said.