Electoral Records Requests Among The Red and Blue County Correspondents: Comments from Lehman, Cohen, Ertmer, and Lindell

Is the November election a third or fourth thing on your radar? the county’s director of elections and registration, Forrest K. Lehman, asked. It should be number one.

Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors, said the barrage of records requests had hit red and blue counties alike. “Election officials don’t wake up on Election Day or the day before and decide to put on an election,” she said. “Running an election takes weeks of preparation.”

Sue Ertmer, the county clerk in the state of Wisconsin, said that she had over 100 requests for records in a couple of weeks. “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.”

The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. Election deniers gave instructions on how to file records requests during a seminar in August.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lindell said providing information to the public was an important part of the job of election workers. More than a thousand election jurisdictions have sent him digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter, also known as cast vote records. The records show that balloting has been manipulated nationwide, despite the fact that election experts have denied the claims before.

An Educating and Compassionate Report of the 2020 California City Clerk Elections: Natalie Adona, a Los Angeles County Election Official

Editor’s Note: This roundup is part of the CNN Opinion series “America’s Future Starts Now,” in which people share how they have been affected by the biggest issues facing the nation and experts offer their proposed solutions. The views expressed in these commentaries are the authors’ own. Read more opinion at CNN.

This is the beginning of a speech that I gave in January 2019. I remember when I was the city clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan, that a shift in the public perception of our elections and election officials was well underway.

But election denial has spread even to places Mr. Trump won handily. In Northern California’s mostly rural Shasta County, where he carried two-thirds of the vote in 2020, tensions over elections and other issues have been rising for months. Local activists have demanded a halt to early voting, pushed to count ballots by hand and sought to require voter ID at polling places — none of which are legal in the state.

They made me a target of their anger. They falsely accused me of violating state campaign finance laws, of partaking in unspecified acts of corruption and of lying about my work experience. A mailer that was distributed countywide made me dislike some of the people who received it. It got so bad at one point that I had to get a restraining order against one individual who threatened me.

I remain committed to my job and my role in protecting democracy despite the risks. In the months since the election, my office has worked hard to improve communications, strengthen security and increase staff training opportunities.

Stakeholders from both sides of the aisle must put country before party to keep our elections free and fair. If you think that’s impossible, just let an election official show you how it’s done.

Natalie Adona is a non-partisan office in Nevada County. She is a member of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. Adona is a member of the Election Official Legal Defense Network, the Journal of Election Administration Research and Practice, and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Task Force. One “Faces of Democracy” campaign.

Observing a “contested election results” campaign: Victims of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and their encounter with a videotaped voter

Donald Trump winning on election night, but the race still being close was called a “contested election results”. In this example, Trump would make a victory announcement even though hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots remained to be counted.

By the end of the week, Biden would be leading the demonstrations in and around Philadelphia, which would become violent. The exercise finished, “Even though the initial vote count is largely complete, there is no end in sight as weeks of civil unrest, legal action and intense scrutiny loom.”

During this somewhat prophetic scenario, I watched the top officials in the room express serious concern. It was also plausible, as the scenario sounded extreme.

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. The video of me was posted on the dark corners of the internet and I recieved a slew of attacks, including a mock up of my appearance and a threat to my life.

I had two plain-clothes Philadelphia police officers assigned to follow me everywhere I went since one of the threats turned out to be credible. 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.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/opinions/us-election-workers-voting-threats-roundup/index.html

A Night in the Life of Lisa Deeley: Election Workers Voting Truths Roundup in Michigan During the 2016 November Presidential Election

Election Day has always played a significant role in my life. My mother was the local committee person in our neighborhood. I followed the polls on Election Day since she was a single mom. The barber shop was where I would spend my hours spinning on a leather barber’s chair to take in the election results.

But not every American has a mother – or barber shop – like mine. We need to invest in our teachers and schools so that we can better educate young people about the importance of democratic ideals.

Lisa Deeley, a Democrat, is the chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, a three-member bipartisan board of elected officials in charge of elections and voter registration for the city of Philadelphia.

Much of it dates back to 2016, when a hand recount of the election results in Michigan was requested (then halted), and the Russian attempt to interfere in our politics and social media – ripe with disinformation and misinformation about the presidential election – began to play a larger role in electoral politics.

It led a few to doubt the 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 only reinforced my worst fears. All eyes were on Michigan when I oversaw the administration of the most challenging election of my career. Unfortunately, my team and I made an error in resubmitting an absentee voter file on election night – a mistake we quickly caught and corrected the morning after the election.

A leading national figure held a press conference in Michigan, making false claims that 2,000 votes for one presidential candidate had gone to another, which pushed my colleagues and I into the national spotlight.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/opinions/us-election-workers-voting-threats-roundup/index.html

A Report on Flint: “2000 Mules” – Defending Michigan’s Democratic Absentee Vote Counting Boards

The process that the committee has developed can be used by election officials and law enforcement to prepare for elections. According to this document, election officials and law enforcement should work together to establish order and safety around election spaces, plan for a variety of possible disruptions and practice their responses ahead of each election.

It is my 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 is running as a Republican for Oakland county clerk. She currently serves as a senior election expert with The Elections Group.

The note is intended for the editor. Norman Eisen was the White House ethics czar, and advised on election law when he was there. Taylor Redd is studying national elections. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. CNN has more opinion.

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.

People who take part in activities like this are often motivated by a false belief like the one depicted in the film “2000 Mules”, which may have intimidated some voters. Some Arizona voters stated in sworn statements that the ballot box surveillance had made them decide not to vote by absentee ballot. In at least one documented instance, the individuals surveilling ballot drop boxes took photographs of a voter’s license plate number.

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. It was stated that the boards of election were required to assign equal number of poll workers from each major political party.

“Flint has over 80% Democrat inspectors, and over 90% Democrat inspectors for the Absentee Vote Counting Boards,” said Michigan GOP spokesperson Gustavo Portela, who called the ratio “unacceptable.” He pointed to a state law requiring that the party breakdowns for those workers to be as close to equal as possible.

The legal action was taken on the question of “standing”, since the state statute only allows the county chairs of major parties to decide whether the grievance process is available. The lawsuit circumvented that requirement.

There was no time or staff to conduct another day of polling for new workers when this case was brought at the last minute. And by targeting Flint, the GOP was picking on a city with majority Democratic and Black populations. Political theatre for ugly partisan purposes is inescapable.

With the two cases outlined here – as was the case in 2020 – the courts were a bulwark against attempts to undermine the election. These cases show rule of law is still being used to keep our democracy free from those who would harm it.

Right-wing media figures and Mr. Trump have caused fears of election integrity. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in elections, they led the charge for new laws that tighten voting rules and, as their talking point goes, make it “harder to cheat.”

Voting rights organizations in some states have set up hotlines to deal with issues, as well as stations volunteers around polling places to de-escalate tensions. In Ohio a coalition specifically brought in religious leaders from multiple denominations for the task.

And election officials say they feel increasingly on edge, ready not just for the frenzy of Election Day but the chaos of misinformation and disputes that may follow.

The Maricopa County Election Office: Counting Absentee Ballots in the Light of Recent Lawsuits and Campaigns Against Electronic Voting Machines

“I’ve felt like I’ve been stabbed in the back repeatedly so much that I don’t have anything but scar tissue,” said Clint Hickman, a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz., home to Phoenix.

Like some other election offices, the Maricopa election office has beefed up its security in preparation for Tuesday. The building was fortified after being a target of right-wing protests in 2020. Last month, an email to election officials promised to “find” their personal addresses and made reference to the violence of the French Revolution. The F.B.I was referred to by the Arizona secretary of state.

Some of the lawsuits have not been successful. Even if the margin of an election is close enough that a group of disputed ballots can make the difference, post-election litigation may be a source for cases that haven’t produced the orders the challengers were seeking.

The pre- election litigation has focused on the issue of whether entire classes of ballots should be tossed, with many lawsuits accusing ballots missing some information of being invalid.

The order blocking state election guidance was obtained by a Republican lawsuit in Wisconsin.

More than 100 lawsuits have already been filed — compared with 70 at this point two years ago — a surge of litigation from both parties and their allies. On the Republican side, dozens of lawyers and firms that sought to overturn the 2020 election are again working for parties and candidates this cycle.

Democrats and outside groups have contributed to the litigation, often pushing for leniency in counting absentee ballots and challenging local Republican officials’ plans to hand-count ballots — a nod to newfound, widespread suspicion of electronic voting machines on the right.

In Nevada, a state where Republicans hope to flip a senator seat and gain control of the governor’s office, the Secretary of State halted hand counting in rural Nye County. The action came after the state Supreme Court sided with the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada’s contention that volunteers reading aloud the votes each candidate received within ear shot of public observers violates state law, barring the early release of election results.

In Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas, election skeptics have been monitoring the absentee ballot processing, asking questions rooted in conspiracy theories about hacking voting machines.

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.

The Secretary of State in Arizona, who is also the governor, has sent 18 voter intimidation referrals to law enforcement. In the complaints, which were heavily redacted, voters described being watched, photographed with long-lens cameras and having their license plates recorded. Some, including one filed on Thursday from a voter in Phoenix’s Central City neighborhood, came after the judge’s order had been filed.

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. When candidates at a rally headlined by Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, on Thursday night called on the crowd to vote in person, they were met with cheers.

The homemaker from Phoenix attended the Lake rally and said she used to vote by mail. But Ms. Black said that since the 2020 election, which she believed was stolen, she did not trust Ms. Hobbs, who is both the secretary of state and a Democratic candidate for governor, to oversee the process. She said that she wanted to vote on the day. I don’t want to take any chances.”

In states where Republicans distrust mail ballots, they can re-create a red mirage, where votes cast on Election Day are counted first and Democrats come in later. Mr. Trump said the Democrats rigged the results two years ago.

The Shasta County Clerk, Registrar of Vacancies and State Voting Rights, and the 2018 Georgia General Relativity Election Day Problem

In the face of public protest, the county’s chief executive resigned, its health officer quit and the health board publicly denounced the state’s vaccine mandates.

Cathy Darling Allen, the Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said she has familiar Election Day worries: A forecast for as much as 10 inches of snow on Sunday night could prevent some of the 180,000 voters in her mountainous county from getting to the polls.

In Georgia, a state with a long history of intimidation and tension at the polls, some community leaders were worried by rising 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. I see people dressed in intimidating outfits in Arizona.

More than 65,000 voters in Georgia have had their registrations challenged by fellow citizens, under procedures laid out in a new voting law. Even though most of the challenges have been thrown out, it has unsettled some Georgia voters, and tossed some off the rolls. Barbara Helm, a homeless woman in Georgia, was forced to vote because her registration had been removed due to the Republican 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.

“What we saw in 2020 was this effort to undermine the elections, but, for the most part, it happened after the elections,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the organization Common Cause, which advocates on democracy issues. “This time what we are seeing is the prep beforehand.”

The fringe legal groups that tried to bolster Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn his electoral loss brought some of the cases.

The court fights over the midterms may play a pivotal role in determining the winners in this week’s elections and even, perhaps, the balance of power in Washington. They also could set the ground rules for the 2024 presidential election, as the parties and outside groups test their strategies for when Trump – whose lies about a stolen 2020 election have shaped the current legal environment – could be on the ballot again.

“My concern is that the number of those undated mail ballots could exceed the margins in some of those races, which could create real problems,” said David Becker, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research. It is better to resolve the disputes before you understand the results and the margins. It could create a political axe if the margins are clear.

The RNC Chairwoman stated that the ruling by the state Supreme Court was a monumental victory for Pennsylvania’s voters and a roadblock in Republicans’ attempts to make it easier to vote and cheat.

In Michigan, the candidate for secretary of state is trying to get a court to Throw Out many Absentee Ballots in Detroit because they were not requested or returned in person.

Loperfido sees the potential that their allegations could lead to post-election challenges, brought through the state’s administrative process for challenging ballots, alleging the ballots are invalid because the signatures don’t match.

This year the Republican National Committee is trying to find new poll workers. And national and state GOP parties have gone to court to demand proof they are being hired. The fights have centered on the requirements imposed on poll workers and what records Republicans can obtain about the workers’ identities, while other lawsuits have taken aim at the policies for poll observers.

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.

CNN reached out to the lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party, as well as the Ward for a comment. The RNC has defended the push in court as an effort to ensure a robust representation of their party when it comes to Tuesday’s elections.

“We are filing, and mostly winning, these lawsuits because counties in various states are violating the law, plain and simple,” the RNC said in a statement to CNN. Every win is a win for transparency.

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 said she was worried that the Republicans would say if the election was not perfect, that all the votes wouldn’t count. An election has never run perfect in the history of the world.”

Western battleground states have become the sites of disputes over the technology that is used for voting, where outlandish theories about fraud in the 2020 election have manifested in pushes to conduct aspects of the midterm elections by hand.

Cochise County, in southeastern Arizona, has more than 80,000 registered voters, and the county’s actions come on the eve of the high-stakes election with competitive races for governor, a US Senate seat and the state elections chief on the ballot.

David Stevens, one of the hand count’s proponents, did not reply to a CNN request for comment. The Republic states that during the court hearing, Stevens stated that he believed the county had the authority to go ahead with the count.

If the secretary of state signs off on a new plan in which volunteers tally results in silence, Nye County still hopes to revive hand counting, according to Arnold Knightly. Nye and Cochise plan to use electronic machines to count votes.

Critics of these parallel counts say they could, if allowed to proceed, set the stage for dueling results – feeding further distrust of the election among some voters and the county officials charged with certifying the general election results in the weeks ahead.

The real problem: How many lives have changed in the last two decades? Or what did we really learn from the dirty little days of September 11, 2001?

People don’t like to think that we could live like that. But understanding the tangible, everyday scale of these problems — what’s changed and what hasn’t — genuinely isn’t easy.

In endless tension with more abstract questions about the big picture is the practical reality that in a democratic republic, real people, with real lives, set up the voting equipment in a middle school gym somewhere, check you in, hand you a ballot, hand you a sticker, make sure the tabulator is empty before the count begins — the full battery of mundane procedures that start in your neighborhood and filter up through the county and the state and, in a presidential year, all the way up through the country.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice announced that a Georgia man has pleaded guilty to wire fraud nine years after stealing more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road, the legendary dark-web market. If you’ve heard of it, things are disorderly over at the micro-blogging site, following the introduction of a blue check option for paying up to $8 a month. It’s a gift for scammers and grifters of all shades.

Two large ships, with their trackers off, were seen near theNord Stream 2 pipe in the days before the gas leaks were detected. Officials suspect sabotage, and NATO is investigating. Plus, Russian military hackers are pivoting to a new strategy that favors faster attacks with more immediate results.

Twitter Security Mayhem Roundup: Elon Musk Resigned from the Micro-blogging Site after an FTC Anomaly in November 2009

This week saw more of the same at the micro-blogging site, as security executives left in a dispute over what the company should do to meet FTC requirements. The Federal Trade Commission fined the company $50,000 for violations of privacy laws after a pair of data breeches in 2009. The company settled with the FTC earlier this year after it was caught serving ads to user emails and phone numbers, which people supplied as part of their security measures. The FTC could impose a huge fine on the company if they did not comply with their commitments.

In a message posted to Twitter’s Slack that was obtained by The Verge, an attorney on the privacy team wrote that engineers could be required to “self-certify” that their projects complied with the settlement, burdening the engineers with “personal, professional, and legal risk.” The employee added that Alex Spiro, Musk’s lawyer, told workers that “Elon puts rockets into space—he’s not afraid of the FTC.”

The resignations came as the company began battling a wave of corporate impersonators who gamed the company’s new paid verification system to shitpost hours after it launched.

Donald Trump, for example, used the glitch to claim that votes were being suppressed. Researchers at the University of Washington found online chatter about tabulator problems started to trend after Republican activist Charlie Kirk posted about them; later in the day, Trump took to Truth Social to suggest, without evidence, that only “Republican areas” were impacted by the errors. The officials in Arizona announced that they had fixed the problem by changing the printer settings.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-security-mayhem-roundup/

An Extradition Report on the LockBit Campaign and the Failure of a Regional Lottery Commission to Present a Record-Breaking Drawing

The US Justice Department and Europol stated that a Canadian man was arrested in Canada over his alleged involvement in the LockBit ransomware campaign. LockBit has claimed at least 1,000 victims, according to Deep Instinct’s 2022 Interim Cyber Threat Report, and is responsible for around 44 percent of ransomware campaigns this year. The United States wants to extradite Vasiliev, who is currently in Canada, to face charges of piracy and malicious damage to protected computers. If convicted, he faces a maximum of five years in prison.

A security issue delayed a record-breaking $2.04 billion Powerball drawing after an unnamed state failed to submit the appropriate data and complete security protocols. According to the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, one of the regional lottery commissions failed to finish tabulating their sales and ticketing data in time for Monday night’s drawing. The winner of the ticket bought at the Joe’s Service Center gas station located in Altadena, California was the only one who had not left their house.