Category Archives: election administration

“Wisconsin is lagging behind other swing states in shoring up election policies following 2020 chaos”

NBC News:

Four years ago, Wisconsin arguably was the state where Donald Trump came the closest to overturning the election results.

A barrage of lawsuits aimed at invalidating hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic votes in the crucial battleground sought to take advantage of certain election policies in the state related to absentee ballots that were cast early and by confined or disabled voters, as well as those where election workers completed certain missing information on the envelopes.

The effort made its way all the way to the state Supreme Court, then controlled by conservatives, which ruled by one vote against Trump’s bid to overturn the results.

And yet, heading into the next presidential election, lawmakers in Wisconsin have done little to prevent a similar scenario from playing out again in the event of a close race.

State lawmakers have failed to enact any measures that would serve to clarify the nuances of absentee ballots that Trump, now the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, attempted to exploit. They also have not closed loopholes that could provide allies of the former president with openings to insert conspiracy theories and misinformation.

And the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees elections in the state, has issued pieces of modest guidance, but remains flooded with partisan attacks and efforts to impeach its top official.

That all stands in contrast to other swing states that were also targeted by Trump allies in the wake of the 2020 election. In Michigan, Democratic lawmakers have implemented broad reforms to election security and ballot counting. And in Pennsylvania, the Democratic governor recently rolled out an election security task force designed to mitigate threats to the vote this year.

But in Wisconsin, many of the same obstacles, questions and gray areas — regarding drop boxes, disabled and elderly voters, ballot processing and, perhaps most importantly, the protection of an election oversight apparatus that has been inundated by threats and attacks — remain unaddressed, alarming election workers and watchdogs in the state.

“Statewide, I don’t see a lot of change,” said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, the top election official in Wisconsin’s second-most populous county. “It’s not like something dramatically different has happened here,” added McDonell, a Democrat.

Jay Heck, the executive director Common Cause Wisconsin, the state’s branch of the national nonpartisan government watchdog group, added that the consequences could be dire if the right mix of circumstances were to emerge on or following Election Day.

“It could all explode,” he said.

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Funding elections

Justin here. The President’s 2025 budget dropped on Monday, and it once again includes a substantial, long-term, sustained investment in funding elections. $5 billion, this time around.

I continue to think that this is right at the top of the list of critical election issues. It’s not as juicy as mapping out the endless labyrinth of hypothetical post-election shenanigans, or repeatedly saying AI — the “blockchain” of 2024. But it’s profoundly important, and (with some notable exceptions) tragically undercovered.

You want voting systems that are secure and reliable? That costs money. You want officials who know what they’re doing? That costs money. You want a communications structure able to withstand information dysfunction? That costs money. You want an electoral process that’s accessible to eligible voters? That costs money. You want results that are fast and accurate? That costs money.

Election officials have been making stone soup for way too long now, even as our expectations have expanded, county budgets have tightened, and the environment has gotten more difficult. Jurisdictions have taken philanthropic options — a last resort in the first place — off the table without stepping up to cover the gap. At this rate, we’re asking to get the elections we pay for, rather than the elections we demand and deserve.

After a few collapses, America finally decided to invest in roads, bridges, sewers, and broadband. The election system is the infrastructure of infrastructure: everything else we do in this country builds on that substrate. The President has repeatedly (FY2023 here and here, FY2024 here, FY 2025 here) tried to add the election system to the infrastructure we actually maintain. Congress has completely ignored the call. The strategy appears to be “hope it all holds up again.” Which is not actually a strategy.

Funding local election infrastructure is a profoundly bipartisan issue. Every member of Congress got their current job through the elections process, which elects Republicans in Republican areas and Democrats in Democratic areas. The bridge every member takes to get to work is the same bridge they’ve stubbornly refused to maintain. Can we please shore it up before it breaks, this time?

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“America’s election chiefs are worried AI is coming for them”

Zach Montellaro for Politico:

A false call from a secretary of state telling poll workers they aren’t needed on Election Day. A fake video of a state election director shredding ballots before they’re counted. An email sent to a county election official trying to phish logins to its voter database.

Election officials worry that the rise of generative AI makes this kind of attack on the democratic process even easier ahead of the November election — and they’re looking for ways to combat it.

Election workers are uniquely vulnerable targets: They’re obscure enough that nobody knows who they really are, so unlike a fake of a more prominent figure — like Joe Biden or Donald Trump — people may not be on the lookout for something that seems off. At the same time, they’re important enough to fake and just public enough that it’d be easy to do.

Combine that with the fact that election officials are still broadly trusted by most Americans — but don’t have a way to effectively reach their voters — a well-executed fake of them could be highly dangerous but hard to counter.

“I 100 percent expect it to happen this cycle,” New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said of deepfake videos or other disinformation being spread about elections. “It is going to be prevalent in election communications this year.”

Secretaries of state gathered at the National Association of Secretaries of State winter meeting last month told POLITICO they have already begun working AI scenarios into their trainings with local officials, and that the potential dangers of AI-fueled misinformation will be featured in communication plans with voters.

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“20 years of data shows no link between mailed ballots and illegal voting”

Steven Rosenfeld for The Fulcrum:

It is an article of faith among those who do not believe Donald Trump lost in 2020 that mailing ballots to voters increases illegal voting — often called voter fraud.

“Before the machines were introduced, vote riggers needed a way to cheat and it always involved generating LOOSE BALLOTS,” read a recent post on a pro-Trump Telegram “election education” channel. “It’s possible and therefore it happens,” said a nearby post.

It is understandable why disappointed Trump supporters are wary of mailed-out ballots. The Covid-19 pandemic led to a historic expansion of their use as a way to protect voters and election workers. By the time the 2020 election ended, 73 million Americans — 46 percent of all voters nationwide — had voted with a mailed-out ballot. That volume was nearly triple the voters who received a ballot by mail in 2018’s general election.

But articles of faith are not facts. As the 2024 presidential cycle revs up and Trump, the likely GOP nominee, keeps attacking elections, it is worth revisiting the most extensive national study by political scientists that looked at whether mailed-out ballots have any relation to voter fraud. In a word, their answer was “no.” That conclusion was based on comparing incidents of illegal voting during the two decades before the 2020 presidential election to the increasing use of mailed-out ballots during that time.

“If voting by mail creates more opportunities for fraud, those opportunities do not appear to have been realized in the data,” George Mason University assistant professor Jonathan Auerbach and Stephen Pierson, director of science policy for the American Statistical Association, wrote in their 2021 analysis for ASA’s journal, Statistics and Public Policy.

The statisticians are not saying voter fraud does not exist. They are showing — with state-by-state data from 2000 through 2019 — that it is exceptionally rare. When illegal voting has occurred, their charts reveal, it usually involves no more than several dozen ballots. That volume is nowhere near the thousands of votes that would have been needed to alter the closest recent presidential election margins…..

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“Delaware’s early voting and permanent absentee laws are unconstitutional, a judge says”

AP:

Laws allowing early voting and permanent absentee status violate Delaware’s constitution and are invalid, a judge ruled in a lawsuit brought by a state elections inspector and a Republican lawmaker.

The laws are “inconsistent with our constitution and therefore cannot stand,” Superior Court Judge Mark Conner declared in a ruling late Friday.

Elections inspector Michael Mennella and Senate Minority Leader Gerald Hocker showed by “clear and convincing evidence” that the laws were unconstitutional, the judge said.

Friday’s ruling follows a 2022 state Supreme Court decision that laws allowing universal voting by mail and Election Day registration were unconstitutional. The justices said the vote-by-mail statute impermissibly expanded absentee voting eligibility, while same-day registration conflicted with registration periods spelled out in the constitution.

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“The 2020 election took days to call. Could it happen again this year?”

NBC News:

After the 2020 presidential election took days to call, many states reworked how they process mail ballots with the goal of delivering results faster — and cutting off oxygen for conspiracy theories that flourished as the country waited for results. 

Election officials are optimistic that the 2024 vote count will be smoother without the many challenges the pandemic election of 2020 posed to officials. But in the event of a close race, a handful of key battleground states could keep Americans waiting well beyond Election Day yet again to learn who will be president for the following four years.

Clerks in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — two of the most closely divided states in the 2020 election — still will not be able to process any mail ballots prior to Election Day, despite efforts of state lawmakers to change the rules. That means there could again be a massive pileup of absentee ballots to sort through in those states Nov. 5, along with the in-person vote. 

And in North Carolina, a battleground state that has leaned Republican at the presidential level, changes to the state’s voter ID law and early voting process could slow the count.

While longer waits for results are not a sign of problems, experts warn they can be spun that way — as Donald Trump and his allies did in 2020.

“We could have a situation where we just have a couple of bottlenecks,” said Rachel Orey, senior associate director for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project. “That creates huge risk for the spread of mis- and disinformation when you have a couple of states in the spotlight, and you have candidates saying — well, we have results from all these other states. Why are you taking so long? There must be something wrong.”

“Ultimately, the responsibility comes down to the candidates,” Orey added. “But that’s easier said than done.”

In Wisconsin, lawmakers again blocked changes to ballot counting processes earlier this month, with the Republican-controlled state Senate holding up a bill that would have allowed election officials to start reviewing mail ballots before Election Day.  

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New Jersey: “Andy Kim Sues to Block Preferential Treatment on Ballots in Senate Race”

NYT:

Representative Andy Kim, a Democrat running for Senate in New Jersey against the state’s first lady, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday that seeks to redesign the ballot before June’s contentious primary election, arguing the current layout unfairly benefits candidates supported by party leaders.

The complaint aims to topple New Jersey’s longstanding ballot-design process, which is unique to the state, by asserting it violates the constitution and permits voters to be “cynically manipulated.”

The legal maneuver is a direct attack on the governor’s wife, Tammy Murphy, who is Mr. Kim’s chief opponent in the Democratic primary and is likely to benefit most from the way ballots have traditionally been designed in 19 of the state’s 21 counties.

And it is certain to intensify public debate over the use of “the line,” the preferential ballot position that allows party leaders to bracket their preferred candidates for all races in a prominent column or row. Unendorsed candidates appear off to the side, in a nearby row or at the ballot’s edge, a location commonly referred to as “ballot Siberia.”

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Cert petition filed in Wyoming polling place electioneering restriction

Last fall, I noted the 10th Circuit’s decision upholding Wyoming’s ban on electioneering within 300 feet of the polling place. That restriction is substantially larger than the restriction approved by the Supreme Court in Burson v. Freeman (1992). In light of recent developments, including Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, limiting how states try to restrict “political” apparel at the polling place, and lower court decision on “ballot selfies,” Burson has seen some cutbacks. A cert petition in Frank v. Lee has been filed and docketed here. We’ll see if the case attracts the Supreme Court’s interest.

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“DNC intervenes in GOP effort to nullify Arizona election manual”

Politico:

The Democratic National Committee is looking to jump into a pair of Arizona election lawsuits Tuesday morning, another salvo in the sprawling legal battle over the country’s election procedures ahead of November.

The DNC and Arizona Democratic Party, with assistance from the Biden campaign, filed motions to intervene in two lawsuits filed in state court from GOP and third party groups this month, according to filings first shared with POLITICO. The lawsuits target the state’s Election Procedure Manual — which is designed to guide Arizona election officials in conducting and certifying elections. Republicans have challenged the manual several times, with RNC chair Ronna McDaniel arguing earlier this month that the document is “designed to undermine election integrity.”…

In an effort to invalidate the entire document, the groups argue that Fontes did not provide enough time for public comment on the proposed changes, which must be approved by the attorney general and governor, both of whom are also Democrats. They also zeroed in on specific provisions in the manual, including a rule which Republicans argue limits the public’s access to records containing a voter’s signature. And they targeted a provision that allows federal-only voters who haven’t proven their citizenship to vote in presidential elections.

The second GOP-led lawsuit attacks the manual’s instructions for operating ballot drop-off locations and preventing voter intimidation. The document notes that election officials may restrict activities that interfere with access and provides examples of intimidation or harassment.

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“No, Your Honor, You Can’t Call Yourself ‘High Justice’ on the Ballot in Chinese”

NYT:

Hong Le still remembers meeting a charismatic woman campaigning for San Francisco district attorney in 2003. In Cantonese, that woman’s name was 賀錦麗, which is pronounced Ho Gam-lai and means “Congratulate Brocade Beautiful.”

Most Americans know her by another name: Kamala Harris.

“She’s the vice president right now,” Mr. Le, 88, said in Cantonese. “And she deserves it.”

In San Francisco, where more than a fifth of residents are of Chinese descent, politicians have long taken a second name in Chinese characters. And any serious candidate knows to order campaign materials in English and in Chinese.

But the city’s leniency for adopted names has frustrated some Chinese American candidates, who say that non-Chinese rivals have gone overboard by using flattering, flowery phrases that at first glance have little to do with their actual names. Some candidates have gained an advantage or engaged in cultural appropriation, the critics say.

No more. For the first time, San Francisco has rejected Chinese names submitted by 22 candidates, in most cases because they could not prove they had used the names for at least two years. The city has asked translators to furnish names that are transliterated, a process that more closely approximates English pronunciations.

That means Michael Isaku Begert, who is running to keep his local judgeship, cannot use 米高義, which means in part “high” and “justice,” a name that suggests he was destined to sit on the bench.

And Daniel Lurie, who is challenging Mayor London Breed, must scrap the name he had been campaigning with for months: 羅瑞德, which means “auspicious” and “virtue.” Mr. Lurie’s new name, 丹尼爾·羅偉, pronounced Daan-nei-ji Lo-wai, is a transliterated version that uses characters closer to the sound of his name in English but are meaningless when strung together….

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