Nevada Independent:

The Trump campaign and its allies filed a lawsuit Friday challenging a Nevada law allowing elections officials to accept mail ballots for up to four business days after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked before polls close.

The lawsuit alleges that the four-day period for mail ballots to be received violates federal law because it does not conform to the Election Day deadline established by the federal government. Attorneys for the plaintiffs, which include the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party, argue that the law establishing the ballot timeline is therefore “unlawful and must be enjoined.”

“The result of Nevada’s violation of federal law is that timely, valid ballots are diluted by untimely, invalid ballots, which violates the rights of candidates, campaigns, and voters under federal law,” attorneys wrote in the lawsuit filed in federal district court in Nevada.

I expect this lawsuit to fail like the others raising similar claims around the country. The point of these suits appears to be to make it look like the RNC is doing something about claimed fraud and irregularities.

AP:

Nearly two months after the election, a recount settled the outcome in a Northern California U.S. House primary contest, breaking a mathematically improbable tie for second place but also spotlighting the lengthy stretch it took count the votes.

Most California residents vote by mail, and in the pursuit of accuracy, thoroughness and counting every vote, the nation’s most populous state has gained a reputation for tallies that can drag on for weeks — and sometimes longer. Voting in the state’s primary election concluded on March 5.

At time when many Americans have doubts about election integrity, a two-month stretch to tally votes in one House race “absolutely is a problem from an optics point of view,” said Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, which seeks to improve the voting process….

A tally of votes in early April showed the top spot was claimed by former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, a Democrat. Two other Democrats were deadlocked for the second spot with 30,249 votes each — state Assembly member Evan Low and Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian.

That tally was followed by a recount and disputes over contested ballots that concluded Wednesday, with Low picking up a five-vote advantage in the recount to claim the second spot on the November ballot.

The contest will not play into control of the narrowly divided House, which will be decided in swing districts being contested by Democrats and Republicans around the country.

The voter foundation’s Alexander said one of the problems behind lengthy counts is tight budgets for county election officials who do the laborious work. She said there is no direct funding from the state to administer elections, so counties are limited in how many people can be hired to review ballots and what kind of equipment is used. And close contests mean long vote counts.

Order.

Earlier coverage.

LAT:

Alex Lopez doesn’t contest that Joe Biden was elected president in 2020.

His concern lies with how those results came to be.

“By the numbers? He absolutely won it. Ethically? Probably not,” said the 38-year-old Anaheim resident, who works as a logistics coordinator.

Questions about the integrity of the election process have been stoked nationally for years, in large part because of former President Trump’s claims that victory was stolen from him.

The same goes for Orange County, where 26% of adults surveyed in a UC Irvine poll released this month said they did not believe Biden legitimately won the presidency in 2020, with another 17% unsure about the question.

In a purple county with several key races that could help determine the balance of power in Congress, these doubts could cause voters to stay home in November — particularly conservative voters.

A majority of the O.C. Republicans surveyed for the poll — 55% — thought Biden had not won fairly, while most Democrats — 88% — believed the election results.

A majority of people surveyed who aren’t members of either party said Biden won legitimately. However, 23% said he didn’t, and the same percentage didn’t know.

“Distrust in the election system may very well convince some people not to participate, and what we’re seeing is that people who distrust it more tend to skew to the right, and so that would hurt Republicans,” said Jon Gould, dean of the UCI School of Social Ecology, who spearheaded the poll….

Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page started conducting open tours of the ballot counting operation in Santa Ana during the 2022 midterms in an effort to show people the process and alleviate concerns.

But election skepticism and allegations of a “rigged” voting system have persisted.

Jane Timm for NBC News:

Election officials across the country are leaving their jobs at the highest rates in decades, according to new research shared first with NBC News, putting thousands of new officials in place to oversee a tense and high-stakes 2024 presidential contest. 

At least 36% of local election offices have changed hands since 2020, following a similar exodus in the run-up to the midterms in 2022, when 39% of jurisdictions had new lead election officials from four years previously. Both points in time represented the highest four-year turnover rates in two decades, a development that worries election experts and officials who say such jobs are complex and come with a steep learning curve and no margin for error. And 2024’s turnover rate could continue to rise as the year goes on.

Election workers have been exposed to unprecedented scrutiny, threats and harassment following the presidential election in 2020, when Donald Trump falsely claimed the election was stolen and made baseless claims of voter fraud. And as Trump seeks the presidency for the third time, he has continued to predict voter fraud — seeming to lay the groundwork to again claim the election was stolen if he loses in November.

While the turnover rate has jumped in recent years, researchers found that it has been gradually rising for years, suggesting that both new and long-standing challenges are driving administrators from their jobs. From 2000 to 2004, about 28% of local election officials left their jobs. Four years later, 31% of election offices had changed hands.

Experts say that dynamic only reinforces the need to provide better funding and support for election workers to ensure the smooth administration of future elections.

“This gradual increase that we’ve seen over the last two decades really does highlight the need for comprehensive, coordinated strategies that seek to better fund election administration, that seek to reduce the burdens being placed on these election administrators,” said one of the study’s co-authors, Rachel Orey, senior associate director at the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project. “Because clearly, this isn’t something that only happened back in 2020.”

The research was conducted by UCLA researchers Daniel M. Thompson and Joshua Ferrer, who spent years collecting lists and directories of election officials in counties and municipalities around the country to produce the most accurate and expansive picture of election worker turnover available yet. Their data was analyzed and published in partnership with the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, in an effort to better understand turnover as election administrators face harassment, violent threats and increasingly complex and heavy workloads….

Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

The Tarrant County Election Board Tuesday approved an initiative to use pre-numbered ballots in the general election in November. 

In a briefing to the county commissioners ahead of the board’s vote, Tarrant County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig said that pre-numbered ballots would increase election security and allow for more accurate auditing in the case of voter fraud inquiries. 

The practice, however, is outdated, largely unused by electoral authorities elsewhere in the United States and, contrary to proponents’ claims, could actually facilitate voter fraud, rather than prevent it, according to legal, political and computer science experts. 

Ballots in Tarrant County already receive a unique identifying number at the moment of voting, and adding more identifying information to voters’ ballots could potentially make it easier for bad actors to commit fraud like vote buying and voter coercion, according to David Kimball, a political scientist and ballot design specialist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

“The best thing preventing vote buying is the secret ballot,” he said in a phone interview. 

Ballots in federal elections are available for public viewing for 22 months after the election. If a person’s vote is tied to a specific number, then someone who has bought or coerced votes could use the pre-numbered ballot list to confirm that they got their bribe or intimidation obtained the desired result. 

Kimball said that pre-numbering ballots is “extremely rare” in the United States and that most ballots cast in the country have no identifying numbers at all on them. “I don’t know that anybody does it,” he said. “You want the ballots to be anonymous.” 

Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University who has done extensive research on voting machines, pointed to the same risks associated with serial numbers on ballots. 

“The secret ballot is pretty important as a principle, since well over 100 years ago, to prevent people from being paid or coerced to vote a certain way,” he said in a phone interview. 

The best way to prevent ballot stuffing and other types of fraud mentioned by proponents of pre-numbered ballots is to staff polling places with a sufficient number of adequately trained election workers, Appel said. 

“The standard practice is to have enough confidence in your poll workers and to pay enough attention to poll worker training,” he said, adding that staffing polling places with multiple election workers is another age-old tactic for avoiding fraud. “One dishonest poll worker can’t stuff ballots, because there’s another poll worker that can keep an eye on that.”…

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Wisconsin voters on Tuesday approved two referendums that change the state Constitution to prohibit clerks from using private grants to administer elections and add that only appointed election officials can perform tasks to conduct elections.

With over 99% of the vote reported by Wednesday morning, 54.4% of voters approved the first question and 58.6% had approved the second. A majority of Wisconsin voters must vote in favor of a constitutional amendment in order for it to go into effect.

Because a majority of voters selected “yes,” clerks will no longer be able to apply for, accept or use private donations and grants, and the state Constitution will include that only election officials designated by law can perform tasks to conduct elections.

An analysis from the Legislature’s nonpartisan attorneys found that state law already says only appointed election officials can conduct elections, but doesn’t say what activities count as conducting an election. Liberal groups that opposed the referendum worried the lack of clarity could lead to lawsuits….

Dennis Mema has posted this draft on SSRN (53 Pub. Con. L. J. 261 (2023)). Here is the abstract:

The continuous and successful holding of elections stands as one of the foundational pillars of American democracy. In the two decades since the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), federal, state, and local actors have worked in tandem to improve election administration, and, through funding provided by Congress to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), states have been given the means to implement federal best practices. However, there exists a glaring gap wherein many states have diverged from both federal best practices and the behavior of other states—the procurement of election infrastructure such as ballots, voting machines, and tabulators. The procurement processes of some states impose inefficiencies or otherwise negatively impact the administration of elections, while the processes present in others can much more effectively facilitate the resolution of these issues. These processes can have a direct impact on voting rights and the security of election administration. Congress should create a federally implemented procurement standard within HAVA that states must meet in order to receive additional EAC funding; by doing so, the interests of all American voters may be protected at the highest level.