Just weeks before early voting begins in Georgia, Republican Party officials and Donald Trump allies are trying to preemptively sow doubt about the viability of Dominion systems used across the key swing state, arguing in court that the machines should not be used because they are not safe or secure.
In a replay of 2020 tactics, Republicans have continued to claim without proof that Dominion voting systems are susceptible to mass manipulation and vote-flipping by a nefarious actor. And GOP officials in DeKalb County in Georgia, aided by a familiar cast of pro-Trump lawyers, have signaled they are planning to once again question the 2024 election results if Trump loses.
They have sued in state court, arguing the Dominion voting machines are not in compliance with Georgia law and want the Secretary of State’s office to make voting records and ballot images available for public inspection within 24 hours of the election. But the lawsuit is also raising concerns that the DeKalb County GOP officials are attempting to mislead voters so they can explain away a potential loss in November….
The GOP officials who filed the lawsuit say they have obtained new evidence about the vulnerabilities of the Dominion systems, a claim that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, and state election officers say is false. The lawsuit also theorizes that the systems may have already been compromised, despite offering no proof to support that claim.
The plaintiffs are using the “same tired claims that have been rejected by courts again and again,” Elizabeth Young, who is representing Raffensperger’s office, told Judge Scott McAfee at a court hearing this week to determine whether the lawsuit will move forward and additional evidence can be presented. “There is not much credibility in the claim.”
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a nonprofit voting rights organization that has raised concerns about vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting systems as part of a separate lawsuit against state election officials, told CNN she is skeptical about the true intention of the DeKalb County complaint.
“I fear they are just attempting to lay the groundwork for challenging the election based on further exposing the serious weaknesses of the system, demonstrating that the results can be manipulated,” said Marks, who is pushing for Georgia to use hand-marked paper ballots.
Category Archives: election administration
“Hurricane Helene scrambles mail and early voting plans in North Carolina”
Hurricane Helene has caused significant disruptions for election officials in North Carolina and across the Southeast, scrambling preparations for early and mail voting that have been in the works for months.
In western North Carolina, one of the areas hit hardest by the storm, election officials were working Monday to evaluate what changes needed to be made in a key presidential battleground state where mail ballots started going out last week and early in-person voting is scheduled to begin in three weeks.
North Carolina officials mailed 190,000 ballots last week, some of which may be delayed or destroyed by flooding. Mail service is suspended to many areas, which will halt the transport of the ballots. And there’s more pressure for voters to get their ballots in early this year: State legislators recently eliminated a grace period that allowed ballots with on-time postmarks to be counted even if they arrived three days after the election.
At least 14 county election offices are closed and are expected to be for several days, said Karen Brinson Bell, executive director of the State Board of Elections.
“At this point in time as we know it, all the members of our elections community are safe and sound and preparing themselves to serve all eligible voters in North Carolina,” Brinson Bell said, noting that the officials were working through challenging circumstances with power outages, limited cell service and impassable roads. One staffer in Buncombe County walked more than 4 miles to work Monday, she said.
Officials in Buncombe County are assessing polling sites and working to account for staff and board members. Some staffers are stranded, Corinne Duncan, the county’s election services director, said in an update shared by a spokesperson. The county’s election offices have power but no water, but staffers still managed to drop off 200 mail ballots at the post office Monday….
“Trump Allies Bombard the Courts, Setting Stage for Post-Election Fight”
Republicans have unleashed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ahead of the November elections, setting the stage for what could be a far larger and more contentious legal battle over the White House after Election Day.
The onslaught of litigation, much of it landing in recent weeks, includes nearly 90 lawsuits filed across the country by Republican groups this year. The legal push is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before Election Day in 2020, according to Democracy Docket, a Democratically aligned group that tracks election cases.
Voting rights experts say the legal campaign appears to be an effort to prepare to contest the results of the presidential election after Election Day should former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, lose and refuse to accept his defeat as he did four years ago. The lawsuits are concentrated in swing states — and key counties — likely to determine the race. Several embrace debunked theories about voter fraud and so-called stolen elections that Mr. Trump has promoted since 2020.
In Montgomery County, Pa., the state’s third-largest county, the party is seeking to force local officials to count ballots by hand, evoking debunked conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines. A case filed by the Republican National Committee in Nevada this month falsely asserts that nearly 4,000 noncitizens voted in the state in 2020, a claim that was rejected at the time by the state’s top election official, a Republican.
If successful, the Republicans’ lawsuits would shrink the electorate, largely by disqualifying voters more likely to be Democrats. They seek purges of voter rolls, challenge executive orders from President Biden aimed at expanding ballot access and create stricter requirements to voting by mail.
Election experts, including some Republicans, say a vast majority of the cases are destined to fail, either because they were filed too late or because they are based on unfounded, or outright false, claims.
The volume and last minute timing of the cases, along with statements from party officials and Trump allies, suggest a broader aim behind the effort: Laying the groundwork to challenge results after the vote. The claims in the lawsuits may well be revived — either in court or in the media — if Mr. Trump contests the outcome.
“Many of these cases reinforce particular narratives, particularly those about immigrants and voting,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections. “Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy.”
Republican lawyers involved said their work was aimed at creating more confidence in elections.
“Our legal efforts are fighting to fix the problems in the system, hold election officials accountable, protect election safeguards and defend the law,” Gineen Bresso, who is running the election integrity operation for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, said in a statement. “While Democrats want a system open to fraud without safeguards, that counts illegal votes, we are committed to securing the election so every legal vote is protected.”…
“On private call, Arizona’s top Democrats debated a ‘dire’ ballot dilemma”
rizona’s Democratic leaders knew they had no good options when they jumped on a phone call this month. They had just learned tens of thousands of residents had been registered to vote for decades, even though there was no record they had provided proof of citizenship — a requirement under state law.
Their predicament was “an urgent, a dire situation,” Gov. Katie Hobbs said, according to audio of the call obtained by The Washington Post.Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said critics would “beat us up no matter what the hell we do.” Attorney General Kris Mayes worried they would be accused of rigging the 2024 election in a crucial state.
Changing the voting status of these Arizonans risked disenfranchising legitimate voters six weeks before the election. Letting them vote as they had in the past could violate the law. Even though the problem predated these officials by 20 years, it was on them to fix. And though it affected only state and local races, not the presidential or Senate elections, they knewafter four years of attacks on the state’s election systems that no matter what they did, critics would have a ready-made issue to seize on if they didn’t like the outcome in November.
“When this goes public, it is going to have all of the conspiracy theorists in the globe — in the world — coming back to re-litigate the past three elections, at least in Arizona,” Hobbs said. “And it’s going to validate all of their theories about illegal voting in our elections, even though we all know that’s not true.”…
“Can you imagine telling 67,000 Republicans they can’t vote on the abortion initiative,” Mayes asked, her tone incredulous. “I mean, Katie, I understand your point about not politicizing this, but the reality is that if we let this happen, all of these elections are challengeable. They’re going to be calling for a new election.”
Responded Hobbs:“They’re going to be calling for new 2020 and ’22 elections as well.”
Fontes reiterated that he wanted voters to receive full ballots, and Hobbs shifted her stance to back him
“I hear you,” the governor said. “I agree with you. It’s your position to do that, not mine, and I’m going to support your call.”
But, she noted, they would face a wave of criticism. “It’s still going to create just this s— storm of ‘told you so, all these illegals are voting,’ from the other side,” said the governor, referring to Republicans.
Fontes argued that no matter what they say or do, Republicans are “going to beat us up.”
Hobbs had suggested that the issue would be best solved with a court decision. “That would provide that cover, that legal cover,” the governor said. She suggested that the litigation should come “from someone who’s friendly to us,” who would align with their desire to keep the solution nonpartisan.
That notion within days evolved into what Fontes called a “friendly lawsuit” that Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (R) brought against the secretary of state. Richer, like the three Democrats, has faced years of threats and harassment for doing his job. He lost his July primary election to another Republican and had little to lose by initiating a legal fight.
Fontes and Richer asked the state Supreme Court to quickly give them an answer. Around the same time, Hobbs announced the computer issues at the division of motor vehicles that caused the problem had been quickly fixed. Soon after, the court issued a ruling that said the voters’ eligibility to cast full ballots should remain in place. Richer declined to comment Saturday….
Oct. 1 Event: “Election Officials in Swing States and the 2024 Election”
Great lineup at this Ash Center event:
Election administrators are on the front line of ensuring our elections are safe and fair this November. There is no one for who this is truer than for the Secretaries of State in the “swing states.” The vote margins in these states are expected to be small, and some people are already questioning the election’s integrity. Many Americans are concerned about what will happen when voting begins and what is being done to prepare. The Ash Center invites you to a discussion with the heads of elections from Arizona, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina to hear about what they’ve been doing to ensure the election process is smooth and can be trusted.
Speakers include:
- Karen Brinson-Bell, Executive Director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections
- Adrian Fontes, Secretary of State of Arizona
- Al Schmidt, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
- Archon Fung (Moderator), Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government
“Latest strategy in fighting election skepticism: Radical transparency”
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez for WaPo:
In this conservative bedroom community of Phoenix, where Donald Trump remains popular and his 2020 loss is viewed with suspicion, election falsehoods don’t fizzle.
They fester and grow.
So as Pinal County officials prepare for another election with the former president on the ballot, they are trying to combat that distrust with radical transparency….
Watch Video of UCLA Hammer Museum/Safeguarding Democracy Project Forum: Democracy and Risks to the 2024 Elections (Leah Aden, John Fortier, Yoel Roth)
“With Trump Ready to Pounce, What Happens When Election Officials Make Mistakes?”
New from Steven Rosenfeld.
“And then what?” should accompany hypotheticals surrounding January 6, 2025 disaster scenarios
Continuing in the spirit of my recent blog post, I want to visit this Politico piece Rick H. posted earlier this week. It offers four specific disaster scenarios surrounding the counting of electoral votes, with no better sourcing than that rumors have been “circulating” about them along with some speculation. But rather than scrutinize the claims by speaking to, say, lawyers or academics who have studied the issue, Politico simply uncritically regurgitated them (with later caveats that they are “all quite unlikely,” but printing it anyway). With each scenario, a useful exercise is to ask, “And then what?”
Continue reading “And then what?” should accompany hypotheticals surrounding January 6, 2025 disaster scenariosDoomcasting continues to overstate the case for a presidential election going to the House of Representatives
Justin Levitt‘s excellent piece earlier this election season, “Get Ready for the Scourge of Election Season: Electoral-Process Porn,” is well worth another read. That’s because a new round of paranoia about the 2024 election continues to spread.
There are a series of wild cases made that the 2024 election can be “thrown to the House of Representatives” with one weird trick: a state refusing to certify the vote.
Rachel Maddow started the most recent trend of stories on this in a New York Times piece, a piece later discovered to have so many errors it had a significant rewrite in the middle along with a correction appended to it. But that hasn’t stopped the doomcasters.
The authors of this piece at USNews wrongly make the claim, “If partisans in one key state were to halt the certification of votes, blocking either candidate from reaching the 270 Electoral College votes required to win, our next president could be selected by the next U.S. House of Representatives.”
More recently, Mother Jones parroted a claim by Stacey Abrams: “If there’s a lengthy dispute over the vote count, Georgia could miss the December 11 deadline for certifying its Electoral College results. If no candidate receives the 270 votes necessary to win the Electoral College as a result, the presidential election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans control a majority of state House delegations, allowing them to swing the election to Trump.”
These scenarios are simply not true. There are potential concerns around certification, but throwing the election to the House is not one of them, and it certainly has nothing to do with the number 270.
Continue reading Doomcasting continues to overstate the case for a presidential election going to the House of Representatives“Georgia election officials worry a GOP-led board will OK last-minute voting changes”
Georgia’s State Election Board is preparing to vote on nearly a dozen rule changes Friday that could take effect before the upcoming election, concerning local officials who are training poll workers and processing absentee ballot applications.
The once-obscure state panel is already facing scrutiny for advancing a pair of rule changes in August that could disrupt the certification of election results. The moves by the board’s Republican majority have drawn praise from former President Donald Trump and pushback from Georgia’s GOP secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and other election officials.
“You can have 10 election directors stand up there and say, ‘This is bad, this is bad, this is bad.’ And then the board says, ‘I make a motion that we approve this rule,’” says Travis Doss, the elections director in Richmond County.
Among the changes up for a vote on Friday is a new requirement that a polling place’s manager and two witnesses hand-count the paper ballots in every ballot box to verify that the count matches the number of ballots recorded by voting machines.
Other proposals include adding hand counts of absentee ballots, requiring the public posting of all registered voters in the upcoming election and expanding access for poll watchers.
The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, which represents 500 members statewide, has urged the state board to pause implementing new rules until after the election. In a letter, the association wrote that its members are “gravely concerned that dramatic changes at this stage will disrupt the preparation and training processes already in motion.”…
“New Guides to Protecting Election Certification from Interference in Battleground States”
“Fontes asks Mayes to explain how AZ can implement reinstated voter registration law”
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes wants Attorney General Kris Mayes to provide elections officials guidance on how Arizona can enforce part of a voter registration law that the U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed to go into effect, even as another court weighs its constitutionality.
The Supreme Court last month ordered Arizona to enforce part of a 2022 law expanding citizenship requirements for new voters, lifting a block on the law that had been put in place by a lower court judge.
The high court’s move allows Arizona to implement a portion of the law that allows the state to stop accepting state-created voter registration forms from Arizona residents unless proof of citizenship is provided.
Now, Fontes has asked Mayes for a legal opinion in light of the ruling.
First, Fontes wants to know if county recorders can perform a standard check on a person whose voter registration doesn’t include documented proof of citizenship prior to rejecting the form. If so, and county elections officials are able to obtain that proof via the check, he wants Mayes to advise whether they can register that person to vote.
Second, Fontes wants Mayes to opine on the official date of registration for a voter who fails to provide proof of citizenship with the initial form, but does so later. Should the date of registration, he asked, be for the original registration date or when the citizenship proof was provided?
Finally, county recorders are required to give those registering to vote until 7 p.m. on Election Day to provide proof of citizenship, but a consent decree in the case states that information must be provided no later than the Thursday before Election Day. Fontes wants Mayes to advise which deadline county recorders should follow. …
“Harris or Trump? Once Again, Election Results Could Take a While.”
The hosts of election night parties may want to book a room for more than just one night.
For the second straight presidential election, it is becoming increasingly likely that there will be no clear and immediate winner on election night and that early returns could give a false impression of who will ultimately prevail.
Large swaths of Americans have changed their voting habits in recent years, relying increasingly on mail-in ballots, which take more time to count than those cast in person on Election Day. States with prolonged vote-counting processes, such as Arizona, have become suddenly competitive. And the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump appears extremely close.
If a winner is not declared on election night, it will not necessarily point to failures in the process. More likely, it will be a result of the intense security measures required for counting mail-in ballots…..
The 2024 results are not expected to be as protracted as in 2020, when the race was not called for Mr. Biden until the Saturday after the election. Some states have improved their procedures for tabulating mail ballots, and election officials across the country have more experience with the process. And mail voting rates, though still much higher than before the pandemic, have declined in some states since 2020, when many voters fearful of the coronavirus saw mail voting as the only option….
Nonetheless, last week, the Trump campaign released a memo seeking to temper any conclusions from early mail ballot request data, warning of a “blue mirage” and that “early Democrat leads in absentee and vote by mail are not at all predictive of victory on November 5th.”
The newfound focus by Republicans on voting by mail, plus improvements in ballot tabulation in key battleground states, is likely to lessen some perception of bias in results by the end of election night.
However, in two critical battleground states — Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the red mirage may persist. Lawmakers in both states have refused to pass legislation allowing local election officials to open and flatten out ballots — a process known as “preprocessing” — before the polls open on Election Day. This puts election officials in a difficult position, churning through both mail ballots and in-person votes at the same time.
“It is a technical challenge with a technical solution, that everyone has known about since 2020, but legislation was never passed to address it,” Mr. Schmidt said….