Dear Vice President Harris

Dear Vice President Harris, 

We write to alert you to serious election security breaches that have threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections, and to identify ways to ensure that the will of the voters is reflected and that voters should have confidence in the result. The most effective manner of doing so is through targeted recounts requested by the candidate. In the light of the breaches we ask that you formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Computer Security Experts Ask Harris to Seek Hand-Counts Due to Voting System Breaches

""Given what we know, that all of this horrible software has gone into the wild, the prudent election director will take absolutely every possible method to verify that the results are, in fact, correct." But, Buell explains, unless ballots are examined by hand, "we don't know that the results we are seeing are actually the results.”” Doug Buell

Computer Scientists: Breaches of Voting System Software Warrant Recounts to Ensure Election Verification

A group of computer security experts have written to Vice President Kamala Harris to alert her to the fact that voting systems were breached by Trump allies in 2021 and 2022 and to urge her to seek recounts in key states to ensure election verification. 
Following the 2020 election, operatives working with Trump attorneys accessed voting equipment in order to gain copies of the software that records and counts votes. The letter to Vice President Harris argues that this extraordinary and unprecedented breach in election system security merits conducting recounts of paper ballots in order to confirm computer-generated tallies.  The letter also highlights the fact that the post-election audits in many key states will be conducted after certification and after the window to seek recounts closes, and that therefore recounts should be sought promptly. 

ACTION NEEDED: Post-Election Volunteering

As I am sure you are aware, New York is a swing state for Congress this year. There are a number of hotly contested contests where we expect there may be challenges to vote by mail, affidavit and absentee ballots.

Given the over-heated rhetoric around tomorrow’s election, we are continuing our volunteer Election Protection program past election day.  We are looking for people in your county to come to the County Board of Election’s ballot canvassing within the next couple of days.

‘What Worries Me? Everything’: Officials Brace for US Election Day

The 2024 presidential election, only days away, is already unlike any other after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol nearly four years ago. Officials across the country are deploying stepped-up security tactics to ensure that this election, like the last one, will be free and fair.

How US Voting Machines Became Safer Than Ever

COMMENT: Clear Ballot profiled here is certified in New York and is in use in Onondaga County.  It uses a paper trail based on hand-marked paper ballots, which is the gold standard for elections .".Voters feed their hand-marked ballots into the scanner, which is the size of a cash register and has a thick screen on top. It tabulates blackened ovals and captures a digital image of the entire slip for backup, then spits the ballot down into a bolted cabinet so it can be audited by hand if needed"

Unfortunately, the NYS Board of Elections also certified the ES&S Expressvote XL that is similar to the controversial machines used in Georgia in that it counts the barcode.  In Georgia, "Dominion’s ImageCast X lets voters tap choices on a touchscreen, then prints their selections on a summary receipt in plain text with a corresponding QR code. Voters deposit the receipt into a separate Dominion tabulator, which scans the code and tallies the vote. ..But anxieties over whether the QR data matches what people actually selected have led to a huge push to revert to pens and Sharpies”.  

What were those machines in the viral Kentucky voting video? And how do they work?

The  ES&S ExpressVote BMD Terminal  used in Kentucky is a BMD (ballot marking device). “The easiest way to think about it is that the touchscreens are just an expensive ink pen,” Taylor Brown”.  It’s reassuring that Kentucky is using this system and not the ES&S Expressvote XL that  New York State Board of Elections certified last year.

2024 election problems include fake videos and damaged ballots

Officials have been bracing for problems for months. In May, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned the 2024 election likely will be the most attacked by malicious foreign forces in American history. Now, some of those concerns have played out in headlines about multiple fake videos linked to a Russian disinformation campaign, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Justice Department to Monitor Polls in 27 States for Compliance with Federal Voting Rights Laws

"On Election Day, Civil Rights Division personnel will be available all day to receive questions and complaints from the public related to possible violations of federal voting rights laws. Reports may be made through the department’s website www.civilrights.justice.gov or by calling toll-free at 800-253-3931.”

Counting votes is now a dangerous job: how it feels for frontline, swing-state workers

After former President Donald Trump lost in 2020, he has refused to accept the outcome, falsely casting the results as fraud and the election as stolen. This message has been amplified by conspiracy theorists who have peddled claims that the use of machines to count ballots allows results to be rigged. Election workers have been intimidated and threatened.

‘STOP COUNTING VOTES, OR WE’RE GOING TO MURDER YOUR CHILDREN’

When Melissa Kono, the town clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin, began training election workers in 2015, their questions were relatively mundane. They asked about election rules, voter eligibility, and other basic procedures. The job was gratifying and enjoyable; they helped their neighbors while sipping coffee.

But over the past few years, everything has changed. Kono now finds herself fielding questions about what to do when approached by suspicious voters who ask provocative questions or gripe about fraud. She’s added an entire training section dedicated to identifying threats and how to report them. 

Feds looking at Russian interference in key battleground of Bucks County, Pennsylvania

Federal authorities believe a viral video spreading online showing mail ballots being destroyed in the key battleground suburb of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, might be a hoax perpetrated by Russia as part of its covert effort to help elect former President Donald Trump, a federal official exclusively told USA TODAY on Friday.

Editorial: Preserve ballot integrity

The state’s highest court has a chance to shore up election law meant to guard against fraud.
By Times Union Editorial Board, Opinion

The current battle — over who has control on local elections boards to validate or negate an absentee ballot — is ultimately about the integrity of the bipartisan system that has long been entrusted to run elections as fairly as possible. We look the state’s highest court to make the right choice – that is, to reject an earlier appellate ruling and safeguard the admittedly imperfect system we have.

The question at the heart of the case isn’t complicated: What happens when elections officials can’t agree on whether a signature on absentee ballot documents is legitimate?

Georgia election rules passed by Trump-backed board are ‘illegal’, declares judge

A Georgia judge has declared that seven new election rules recently passed by the state election board are “illegal, unconstitutional and void”.


Fulton county superior court judge Thomas Cox issued the order Wednesday after holding a hearing on challenges to the rules. The rules that Cox invalidated include three that had gotten a lot of attention – one that requires that the number of ballots be hand-counted after the close of polls and two that had to do with the certification of election results.

Two Men Have Re-engineered the Us Electoral System in Favor of Republicans

If the right strews constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two people will have cleared the path. Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.

Election experts raise fresh alarms about vote counting delays – and chaos – in battleground states

While several other states have moved to speed up the vote count in the four years since 2020’s post-election chaos, political gridlock in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin has prevented a change that could have paved the way for earlier projections: the ability to begin opening and processing mail-in ballots before Election Day.