Taking the computers out of the voting process: A warning to Nye county officials against using hand-counting machines and tabulation machines in midterm elections

Election workers are on the front lines of managing American elections, and that is why they understand the risks of US democracy. This job has traditionally been low risk in comparison to other types of public service, but that has changed since 2020.

According to many conspiracy theorists, the 2020 election was stolen by an algorithm, therefore if you take computers out of the voting process you can further secure your election.

At a county commission meeting in Nevada’s Nye County this past March, for instance, Jim Marchant, an election denier who is the GOP nominee to be that state’s secretary of state, implored local officials to ditch their vote-counting equipment.

“It is imperative that you secure the trust of your constituents in Nye County by ensuring that you have a fair and transparent election and the only way to do that is to not use electronic voting or tabulation machines,” he said.

It’s a false sentiment that has been perpetuated in far-right corners of the country, and is being shepherded by election denials like MyPillow.

Officials are listening in some cases. Nye County is planning to hand-count ballots, alongside machine tabulation, in this November’s midterm elections, and another county in Nevada, Esmeralda, spent more than seven hours hand-counting just 317 ballots as part of its certification of this summer’s primary election.

No county went in for that. But it is a movement and we’re keeping our eye on it,” Simon, a Democrat, said in an interview with NPR. It’s distressing to see.

In Wisconsin, Hand Counts Are Less Accurate than Using Paper Ballots: Comment on Stewart’s Study of the 2017 Wisconsin Recount

Stewart coauthored a study in 2018 that found ballot scanners to be more accurate than hand counts. The study looked at two statewide races with recounts in Wisconsin, where some localities count by hand and others use machines.

In Wisconsin’s 2011 Supreme Court election recount, the hand-counted paper ballots differed from the recount by 0.28 percent while the difference for scanned paper ballots was 0.15 percent. In its 2016 recount of the presidential election, hand-counted paper ballots were off by 0.18 percent while scanned ballots were off by 0.13 percent.

“All the data shows it is less accurate to do a hand count,” says Simon. “What you’re really asking beleaguered and tired election judges to do at the end of a very long day is to not just do one hand count; if there are 30 contests on a ballot, you’re asking them to do 30 individual and separate hand counts. People are people. They get tired, they make mistakes. “

The election office staff size needs to be increased by at least 10 times and hand counting dozens of races on millions of ballots would probably take weeks or months.

Considering many of the Republicans who are calling for hand counts are the same people who cast doubt on the 2020 election because results weren’t finalized on election night, Morrell says it shows they haven’t done their research.

They don’t understand what that looks like or how much time it will take to do it accurately and correctly, according to Morrell. “Or they wouldn’t be calling for that.”

November 3, 2020: A Strange Day in Nevada County, California, where I Voted for the First Seven Years During the First Run of the Democratic National Convention

“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” Forrest K. Lehman is the county’s director of elections and registration. “It should be number one.”

Perhaps the most pressing problem nationwide is a barrage of requests for election records, from photocopies of ballots to images of absentee ballot envelopes and applications.

The county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., Sue Ertmer, said she fielded some 120 demands for records in only a couple of weeks last month. “When you get those types of requests, it gets a little hard to get a lot of other things done,” she said. “It’s a little overwhelming.”

A number of election officials pointed out that Mike Lindell has encouraged supporters to submit the requests, but the request came from a variety of sources. Election deniers offered instructions on filing records requests at a seminar hosted by Mr. Lindell in Springfield, Mo., in August.

CNN offers an opinion series called America’s Future Starts Now, in which people show how they have been affected by major issues facing the nation and experts offer solutions. The views expressed in these commentaries are the authors’ own. CNN has more opinion.

Since that day, we have increased security and made sure our election workers are safe. My firm commitment to fight for our democracy is not at risk despite the risks of political violence.

November 3, 2020, was a strangely quiet and calm Election Day in Nevada County, California, where I help run the voting process. Voters in the purple county already cast their votes by mail. And those who did come to vote in-person cast their ballots in an orderly and respectful fashion.

The elections deniers made me a target of their anger. They false accused me of engaging in corruption and lying about my work experience. Some even subjected me to racist vitriol in a mailer that was distributed countywide. It got so bad that I had a restraining order against one person who was threatening me.

I have left my career in government and joined the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections because I am committed to restoring Americans’ faith in US democracy.

Country before party is what both sides of the aisle need to keep our elections free and fair. If you don’t think that can be done, let the official show you how.

Natalie Adona is the clerk-recorder elect, a non-partisan office, in Nevada County, California. She is a member of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. Adona is a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Election Administration Research and Practice and a participant in the Issue. One “Faces of Democracy” campaign.

In late September 2020, the Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management called the who’s who of Philadelphia government to the Emergency Operations Center for a more than three-hour tabletop exercise on the 2020 presidential election. Everyone worked to address the problems that arose after a facilitator presented a set of worst-case scenarios.

Democrats chose to vote by mail. As a result, when the in-person results came in on election night, Trump was winning Pennsylvania and several other battleground states. Trump declared victory early Wednesday. But his margin over Biden started to close as mail-in ballots were counted. Trump and his legal team tried many methods to stop the count but were unsuccessful.

By week’s end, Biden would take the lead and demonstrations in and around Philadelphia would become violent. Despite the initial vote count being 98% complete, there is no end in sight as weeks of civil unrest, legal action and intense scrutiny loom.

The officials in the room expressed serious concern during this scenario. As extreme as this scenario sounded, it also felt entirely plausible.

What I did not fully grasp at the time was how much of a risk this would all pose to me. I ran for city commissioner because I wanted to explain to the crowd that the Commissioners run Philadelphia’s elections. This had typically been a low-profile office that served a critical democratic function but carried a relatively low profile and security risk.

A few days after the election, I made the mistake of leaving the bubble of the convention center where the votes were still being counted to get some air. I was followed outside, verbally attacked and videotaped by a member of Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign. I received a lot of attacks after my video was posted on the internet, mocking my appearance and even threatening my life, which is nothing new to women in politics.

One of the threats turned out to be credible, and I had two plain-clothes Philadelphia police officers assigned to follow me wherever I went – including the bathroom. I avoided engaging in basic daily activities, such as getting my hair done, because I did not want to have to explain to my hairdresser who my escorts were.

Election day in Michigan: the embarrassing events of the November 2020 Russian Influence on the Absentee Voter Registration and Elections in the State of Michigan

I have always used Election Day as an important part of my life. My mother was in charge of the local committee. Since she was a single mom, wherever she went, I followed – including the polls on Election Day. Back then, our polling place was a barber shop, where I would spend hours spinning on a leather barber’s chair taking it all in.

Not every American has a barber shop like mine. We need to invest in our teachers and schools, so they can better teach civics education and impart on young people just how precious democratic ideals truly are.

The chairperson of the Philadelphia City Commissioners is a democrat, and they are in charge of voter registration and elections in the city.

The Russian attempt to interfere in our politics and social media is one of the events that took place in the past two years.

Not surprisingly, it led some to doubt our very election process. Doubt in this process, which began as a seed, had grown into an invasive weed choking the profession four years later.

The November 2020 election reinforced my worst fears. I had just overseen the administration of the most challenging election of my career, and all eyes were on Michigan. The morning after the election, we quickly caught and corrected the mistake our team and I made in getting an Absentee voter file up and running.

However, several days later, a leading national figure held a press conference in Michigan and misrepresented what had happened, falsely claiming that 2,000 votes for one presidential candidate had gone to another – thus pushing my colleagues and I into the national spotlight.

Towards a Better Understanding of Elections: Detecting Voting Uncertainties in Harris County with Election Monitors and a Response to the 2020 Post-election Audit

The committee has developed a five-step process that election officials and law enforcement can follow to better prepare for elections. In it, it states that the election officials and the law enforcement should meet, share their situational knowledge, agree on a vision for establishing order and safety around election spaces, and practice their responses ahead of each election.

I hope that more election officials follow our guidelines so that public servants can once again do their jobs without fearing for their lives.

Tina Barton was the appointed city clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan. She is a senior election expert with The Elections Group.

“We therefore respectfully request that the Civil Rights Division send election monitors to Harris County to ensure that Harris County residents’ voting rights are protected.”

The teams are necessary, the secretary of state’s office said, because of their findings in an ongoing “audit” of the 2020 presidential election in Harris County, which includes Houston.

That so-called post-election audit in Texas, a state that former President Donald Trump carried in 2020, was launched as Republicans in states including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona forged ahead with partisan reviews that appeared designed to undermine the 2020 election results and demonstrate local Republicans’ fealty to Trump.

In a letter to the Harris County elections administrator dated Tuesday, the director of the forensic audit division stated that there were a number of mobile ballot boxes that lacked proper chain-of- custody.

The Chair of the Harris County Democratic Party says Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are trying to undermine voter confidence by sowing chaos and doubt in the election process. He added that Tuesday’s letter from the secretary of state’s office “reads like an attack on drive-through voting, which expanded voting access during the COVID pandemic.”

The Harris County officials’ suggestions were called false and a cynical distortion of the law by the secretary of state’s office.

Every single year, we send them to many other counties. “If 15 registered voters or more request election inspectors to be present in their county, we are required to send them – so they’re actually a very common practice that our office has every year – basically just to have eyes on the ground in a lot of these large elections where there are disputes over whether or not proper election protocol and laws are being followed.”

What Does It Mean? Early Voting in Georgia: A Natural Predictive Warning to the Optimistic Leaders in the Light of the Georgia Integrity Act

Editor’s Note: Jay Bookman is an author and national award-winning political columnist from Georgia who has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. He writes a lot for the Georgia Recorder. You can follow him on the micro- internet networking site. The opinions expressed here are of his own. CNN has more opinion.

Georgia is home to a record number of voters and early voting totals are approaching those of a presidential election year. In a closely watched, high-stakes, bitterly fought campaign season, the question is natural: What does it mean?

In terms of predicting outcomes, it’s hard to say. In the Trump era, high turnout is not necessarily the advantage that it used to be for Democrats, and we don’t know how much of the early-voter surge represents newly motivated voters or are merely voters who would have cast their ballots anyway through some other means. It is impossible to know what factors will affect the outcome of the elections, because there are so many variables in play this year.

Pollsters find uncertainty a nightmare. Predicting how people will vote is pretty easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. In a tumultuous year like this one, with so many variables, that’s a caution to the rest of us about putting too much credence in pollsters’ work product.

Georgia Republicans, however, are ready to claim victory on at least one front. They believe the high turnout represents vindication, proving that SB 202 – the “Election Integrity Act” that they passed last year – wasn’t an effort to suppress voter turnout, as Democrats had claimed.

The fear and anger of the voters of both parties may have caused the suppressive impact of last year’s law to be overwhelmed.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/27/opinions/georgia-early-voting-record-meaning-bookman/index.html

Do you really need to vote this time? How you can challenge your voter’s eligibility to vote in Georgia (and why you shouldn’t vote anymore)

Democrats built an effective, well-funded voter protection apparatus to help people overcome bureaucratic hurdles so they can cast their ballot.

That last point is critical. Republicans say the changes made to Senate Bill 202 are necessary to fight fraud because they make it more difficult to cast an Absentee ballot. But logically, that motive makes no sense.

The consequences of that bad-faith narrative should worry us. As we witnessed in 2020, Trump took the suspicion and distrust of the electoral system that the GOP had nurtured over decades and he repurposed it to an even more nefarious goal, transforming it from an excuse to suppress voting into an excuse to treat election outcomes as illegitimate altogether.

“I don’t believe we’ll have a fair election again,” Trump told his supporters at rallies this fall. I don’t think it’s true.

In Georgia, the Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a state law regarding how a voter can challenge another voter’s eligibility to vote. There will not be a limit on the number of persons who can challenge their qualifications. The new law also requires local election boards to hold a hearing on such challenges within 10 business days.

Around the state, conservatives are attempting to challenge the eligibility of tens of thousands of legally registered voters on extremely flimsy grounds and are growing frustrated that those challenges keep failing.

“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. “Get your county in order or get your things in order.”

The Arizona Right-Wave Coalition vowed to sue the Justice Department of alleged intimidation of voters at ballot drop boxes during the midterm elections

The Justice Department waded into a lawsuit that accuses right-wing activists of intimidating voters at ballot drop boxes.

The people taking part in such activities often are motivated by a debunked conspiracy like the one depicted in the film 2000 Mules and their efforts seem to have intimidated some voters. Voters in Arizona submitted sworn statements to the court that said ballot box surveillance had a chilling effect on their inclination to vote by mail. In at least one documented instance, the individuals surveilling ballot drop boxes took photographs of a voter’s license plate number.

A federal judge refused to issue a court order against right-wing activists gathering near drop boxes and taking pictures of voters. District Judge Michael Liburdi, who is overseeing both cases, said there were legitimate concerns about the conduct but there wasn’t enough evidence at this stage to restrict anyone’s First Amendment rights.

The League of women Voters is still fighting for a court order banning armed men and women from gathering near the drop boxes. A hearing will be held on Tuesday.

Right-wing groups who are involved in the case were silent about CNN’s previous coverage of the lawsuit. An attorney for Clean Elections pushed back against the allegations brought in the earlier case at a hearing last week, and their website says their goal is to ensure that “every legal vote must be counted” and to make sure no “illegal votes are added to the mix.”

The Justice Department said that photographing a voter’s license plate is not protected speech if the photographer seeks to express disapproval of drop-box voting.

The Justice Department said in its filing that the right to assembly doesn’t allow people to coercing voters.

Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke out, saying the Justice Department “will not permit voters to be intimidated” during the midterm elections.

Though the early voting has been largely uneventful, many experts and officials are braced for disruptions after polls have closed, when activists and lawyers are prepared to challenge ballots and dispute counting procedures, and losing candidates who have cast doubt on the integrity of the process may file lawsuits.

“So, if it’s really close in Nevada, then you’ve got these lawsuits that are pending, already in the pipeline, that could provide a basis for trying to claim that there was fraud or some reason to think that a Democrat didn’t win,” he said.

Of that Republican total, more than $10 million has gone to firms or lawyers who helped with the 2020 litigation effort, according to campaign finance records.

In early December 2020, Thomas E. Breth and Thomas W. King III, two lawyers in Pennsylvania for Thomas More, filed a motion to direct Gov. Tom Wolf to decertify the election, making a host of claims about improper and illegal ballots cast in the 2020 election. The suit was dismissed in less than a week.

There is an editor’s note. Norman Eisen is a political law expert who advised the White House on election law when he served as President Barack Obama’s ethics czar. Redd is examining national elections. The views in this commentary are of their own. Read more opinion at CNN.

Major victories in two separate voting rights cases this week stunted efforts to harass early voters in Arizona and overwhelm election offices in Michigan with frivolous challenges.

Clean Elections USA was ordered to stop some forms of voter surveys by a judge on Tuesday. Under the court ruling, they are not allowed to come within 75 feet of a ballot drop box, yell at voters within that radius or follow voters – even outside of the 75-foot perimeter. They are not allowed to carry firearms or wear body armor in a 250 foot scope from drop boxes. A court ordered Clean Elections USA to stop posting or sharing personal information about individuals they baselessly accuse of voter fraud.

The Michigan Republican Party and the RNC sued Flint, claiming that their avowed efforts to bring more Republican poll workers in its precincts were not sufficient. The suit said that a state statute required boards of election to assign an equal number of poll workers from each major political party.

The Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee were updated by the City of flint that they intended to reach out to people who weren’t on the list to get an equal number. They said the list the Republicans provided included some duplicative names and people already working as election inspectors.

Even though the case was dismissed on a technical ground, it marked an important milestone. The judge, who made very short work of the case, was not going to indulge the suit. Flint is now complying with the law. If a similar suit is later filed, even parties with standing will face tough sledding.

Why did they bring a non-meritorious suit to this area? In Michigan, it is common for a majority of Republican areas to have mostly Republican poll workers and for minority areas to have mostly Democratic ones.

The courts were a bulwark against attempts to undermine the election with the two cases outlined here. These cases suggests that the rule of law is still protecting our democracy against intimidators.

Trump questioned the validity of the election in Pennsylvania, a state he lost to Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. “Here we go again!” He wrote something. “Rigged Election!”

Do you think Trump has the supposed evidence? An article on a right-wing news site shows no rigging. The article raised suspicion about the data it did not explain.

In 2020, Trump and his allies made a prolonged effort to discredit the presidential election results in advance, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims that the election was stolen. Now, in the weeks leading up to Election Day in 2022, some Republicans have been deploying similar – and similarly dishonest – rhetoric.

Trump is not the only Republican trying to baselessly promote suspicion about the midterms in Pennsylvania, a state that could determine which party controls the US Senate.

Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, spoke on a right-wing show and said that it could take days to complete the vote count after the acting elections chief told NBC News that it could take days.

There was such an extreme shift because, among other reasons, election workers in Pennsylvania can’t start processing mail-in ballots until Election Day. State Democrats have tried for years to relax these rules, which would lead to faster results on Election Night. The legislature was controlled by Republicans and passed a bill making this change last year but it was vetoed due to the restrictions on mail-in voting and Voter ID requirements.

But other prominent Republicans piled on. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted a link to an article about Chapman’s comments and added: “Why is it only Democrat blue cities that take ‘days’ to count their votes? The rest of the country is successful on election night.

Even aside from the fact that the big cities that tend to lean Democratic have many more votes to count than the small rural counties that tend to lean Republican, Cruz’s claim is plain false.

The 2020 election taught us an important lesson: the first results you see after the polls close on Election Night can be very different than the final outcome once all the votes are tallied, a process that can stretch on for days.

Democratic Sen. Ron J. Karamo Cannot Win the 2020 Senate Primary: “Is Something Going to Happen?” a Commentary on GOP Candidate Blake Masters

Precautionary doubt has been cast upon the possible outcome of the Pennsylvania Senate race, as a result of the health challenges of the Democratic candidate.

The election must have been stolen because Biden was such a poor candidate, said right-wing pundits after Trump was defeated. On Fox last week, as Media Matters noted, prime-time host Tucker Carlson made a similar argument about Pennsylvania’s Senate race – suggesting people should not accept a Fetterman win because it would be “transparently absurd” for a candidate who has had difficulties with public speaking and auditory processing since a stroke in May to legitimately prevail.

But there would be nothing suspicious about Fetterman winning in a state Biden won by more than 80,000 votes in 2020. Fetterman leads opinion polls, and polls have consistently found he is more popular than his opponent, Mehmet Oz.

Detroit is one of several cities with large Black populations that has been the target of false 2020 conspiracy theories. The Republican running to be Michigan’s elections chief is now challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes.

Karamo’s lawyer vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday, The Detroit News reported. Other prominent Republicans have distanced themselves from the lawsuit.

Other Republican candidates have vaguely hinted at the possibility that Democrats might somehow cheat on Election Day or during the counting of the votes.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters this week that “we’ll see what happens” when it comes to accepting the results of his reelection race, The Washington Post reported, adding: “I mean, is something going to happen on Election Day? Do the Democrats have something up their sleeves?

The Daily Beast reported that Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate in a tight race in Arizona, told a story at an October event about how he can’t prove it’s not true that, if he beats Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly by 30,000 votes, unnamed people won’t just “find 40,000” for Kelly. In June, he told a similar story.

There is no basis for the suggestion that there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state’s count. But Masters’ comment, like Karamo’s lawsuit, achieves the effect of many of Trump’s pre-Election Day tales in 2020: prime Republican voters to be distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.

In the United States, mid- term elections are often presented as a referendum on party in power and that message appears to be resonated this fall. Voters should think about how the party that wants to regain power will affect the future of this country.

Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at Common Cause, said that the most significant part of the effort to undermine the elections was after the elections. This time we are seeing the preparation before the event.

But the broad view belies signs of strain: A court ordered armed activists to stop patrolling drop boxes in Arizona. A number of voter registration are being challenged in Georgia. Voting rights groups have trained their volunteers on de-escalating. Voters have been videotaped by groups trying to uncover fraud at the polls.

Election officials say they feel prepared for both the rush of election day and the chaos that may come with it.

An Arizonan Senator’s ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign: Why the Secretary of State should not hand Count the ballots

A Republican on the county board of supervisors in Arizona feels like he has been stabbed in the back so many times that he doesn’t have any scars.

It is easy to see the potential hot spots. In Pennsylvania, thousands of ballots have been set aside because they do not include proper signatures or dates. The Supreme Court ruled they shouldn’t be counted in a lawsuit. But the court also ordered election officials to segregate and preserve them, setting the stage for a future legal fight.

In Wisconsin, a GOP lawmaker is trying to stop the state from counting military ballots, because they say there are weaknesses in the system. The lawsuit was filed by the Thomas More Society, which supported the election denial movement.

The Arizona Alliance of Retired Americans, Inc. and a Democratic voter recently filed a lawsuit against officials in Cochise County, challenging the county’s plan to hand count ballots as an audit of the electronic tabulators.

Through litigation in Clark County, Nevada – home to Las Vegas – Republicans secured information and party affiliation of the workers staffing polling places, but their bid for a court order requiring that the county bring in more GOP workers was rejected.

In Maricopa County, where the first “Stop the Steal” protest was held outside the county Elections Department office the day after the 2020 election, armed volunteers dressed in tactical gear stationed themselves outside a ballot drop box in Mesa, the Phoenix suburb.

Republican candidates and party officials have also encouraged their voters to cast ballots in person on Election Day, reflecting two years of legal arguments and talk claiming that Democrats used expanded access to absentee voting in 2020 to illegitimately win the election. Republican candidates for governor in Arizona called on the crowd to vote in person at a rally on Thursday night, which they were met with cheers.

Black is a homemaker from Phoenix and she was at the Lake rally. Ms. Black did not trust the secretary of state to oversee the election since she was not convinced it was free and fair. She wants to vote on “Day of” so that it is counted. I don’t want to take any chances.”

In some states, Republicans’ skepticism about mail ballots may help re-create a “red mirage,” where the votes cast on Election Day are reported first and heavily favor Republicans, while mail-in ballots, which lean Democratic, come in later. Mr. Trump used the trend to falsely suggest that Democrats rigged the results two years ago.

Election Day, Elections, and Religious Rights in Georgia: Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, the Clerk of a Shasta County Supervisor, and Barbara Helm

In the face of public protest, the chief executive resigned, the health department quit, and the board publicly denounced the vaccine mandates.

A forecast for as much as 10 inches of snow on Sunday night could prevent a lot of people from going to the polls, said the clerk of voters in Shasta County.

In Georgia, a state with a history of intimidation and tension at the polls, some community leaders expressed similar unease as they received threats of political violence.

“I will admit I’m apprehensive about Election Day because you never know what some people will do,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia. People in Arizona are wearing outfits that can be intimidating.

More than 65,000 voters in Georgia have had their registrations challenged by fellow citizens, under procedures laid out in a new voting law. The challenges have been thrown out but some voters have been tossed off the rolls. Barbara Helm, who was homeless in Georgia, was forced tovote on a temporary ballot because her registration had been removed by Republican voters during one of their mass challenges. Her dilemma was reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But Bishop Jackson was also buoyed by surging turnout in the state, and pointed to efforts of his church and many other voting rights organizations to ensure voters were prepared for the midterms.

Post-election shifts in the Badger State: predicting the outcome of the 2020 Georgian Senate and Governor’s race with a Democratic candidate

These quirks of the US election system are normal and somewhat predictable. Despite what many Republicans have said, they are not indicative of fraud or wrongdoing.

We’ll see how the post-election shifts shape up in the Badger State, where there is a competitive Senate race featuring a Republican incumbent, and a close governor’s race with a Democratic incumbent.

There was a clear “red shift” in Arizona in 2020. After the results were in, Donald Trump didn’t overtake Biden, who carried the state by roughly 10,000 votes, or just over 3% of the vote.

The Grand Canyon State has a long history of voting by mail. But that trend started changing in 2020, with some Republicans eschewing the method because of Trump’s false claims of fraud. The early results look bluest because mail-in voting is more popular among Democrats.

But these “shifts” can be unpredictable. In 2018, the later waves of results helped Democrat Kyrsten Sinema beat incumbent GOP Sen. Martha McSally. The race was called after a few days.

Two years ago, Trump was leading in Michigan when voters went to bed, but Biden pulled ahead the next day, and the networks soon projected him as the winner. The Michigan secretary of state’s office said Monday that it could again take up to 24 hours for this year’s full results to be reported, though the smaller counties might wrap up earlier than that.

Biden was helped by late waves of ballots from Detroit, a Democratic bastion that historically counts its votes slower than other jurisdictions and is the largest city. If the results from Detroit were to affect the outcome of the election for governor, it would be incumbent Governor’s Gretchen Whitmer.

The Senate and governor’s races will be close this year, with incumbent Brian Kemp facing off against Democratic nominee for the second time.

But the shift might not be as sharp this time around. The percentage of Georgians voting in mail is likely to be less in the future than it is in 2020. And election officials now have more experience with tabulating mail-in votes, leading to a faster count. The impact of the blue shift will likely be blunted by these and other factors.

As the results start pouring in on Tuesday night, remember that Georgia is a runoff state. Next month there will be a balloting where the top two candidates will compete for control of the race.

The state election officials don’t give us many details about the vote counting process, like which types of ballots will be reported first. It is essential that we understand the possible complexion of the early vote.

Furthermore, this is the first midterm election in Nevada with universal mail-in voting. The state adopted this system when Covid-19 hit in 2020, but it is still in use for the year after that.

Another variable are the ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive at election offices after the polls close. Some people call these “late-arriving ballots.” They are legal votes in Nevada and counted if they arrive by November 12.

It is a relatively small state and its vote-count tends to go quickly. Wisconsin relies on thousands of local clerks to administer the election, and they usually wrap up most of the counting on election night.

Many localities are allowed to process mail-in ballots before the election thanks to a new law. Detroit and Grand Rapids are the two biggest cities in the state, and there are some clerks who are not taking advantage of the extra processing time.

About 1 in 5 cases that seek new restrictions have been brought by state GOP committees according to Democracy Docket. The RNC has sought to build out its operations around monitoring elections after being sidelined from that work with a court consent decree that expired in 2018.

David Becker, a former attorney in the Justice Departments voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he was concerned that the number of mail ballots could exceed the margins in some races. “It’s better to resolve those disputes before you know the results and the margins. That could create a political axe to grind once the margins are clear.

The RNC chairwoman said in a statement that it was a huge victory for the rule of law in Pennsylvania and that it made it easier to vote and cheat in the state.

The senior counsel at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice pointed to a case where the Republicans in North Carolina failed to block the use of signature matching to verify the authenticity of Absentee ballots.

This year, the Republican National Committee has engaged in a major drive to recruit Republican poll workers. And national and state GOP parties have gone to court to demand proof they are being hired. There are fights over the policies for poll workers and what records Republicans can get about them, while other lawsuits focus on the policies for poll watchers.

In Virginia, meanwhile, a judge last week ordered officials in Prince William County to appoint more Republicans to top election spots in individual precincts – following legal action by the state and county GOP.

“We have bent over backwards, and we were extremely responsive,” Gates said. I hate to admit it, but certain people are out there. The Arizona Republican Party chair is interested in creating concern, distraction and disruptions in this election process.

The RNC said in a statement to CNN that they’re filing lawsuits because counties in various states are violating the law. “Every decisive victory is a win for transparency at the ballot box.”

Albert, of Common Cause, said that the demands around the country that more Republican workers be hired could be a precursor for attempts after the election to attempt to toss out ballots from election sites in dispute.

She was concerned that Republicans would say if the election wasn’t running perfectly, then all of the ballots wouldn’t count. An election has never run perfect in the history of the world.”

Western battleground states have become centers of disputes over the technology that is used for voting, where claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election have resulted in pushes to conduct parts of the electoral process by hand.

The high-stakes election with competitive races for governor, a US Senate seat and the state elections chief on the ballot are what prompted Cochise County’s actions.

Inconsistencies in Parallel Counts: What do they tell us about the election and how they affect the county officials and the voters?

If these parallel counts are allowed to go forward, critics say they will lead to another distrust of the election among some voters and the county officials who have to certify the results.