“The preliminary battles have raged over voter registration and turnout, precinct closures, misinformation about where people can vote, intimidation of citizens waiting in line during early voting, rejection of “flawed” ballots, and much more.... they all pale before one issue: will there be a fair and accurate vote count?...The answer depends on whether grassroots citizen groups can muster the expertise, the staff, and the clout to make sure ballots are correctly marked, properly scanned, and accurately counted — and then rightly recounted.“

Misinformation and fake news are now threatening public health and endangering democracy itself. What might help contain the problem? Part of the answer lies in a very old remedy: the law of defamation. To see how this might work, consider the situation of Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, two companies that provide software and other services for electronic voting machines. President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has publicly attacked both companies, suggesting that outcomes in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states” were affected by “SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?” Commentators for Fox News, Newsmax and One America News have implied or suggested that the companies’ technologies have changed votes. Yet Smartmatic says it has done hardly any business in the U.S. since 2007, and in the 2020 election, it did none at all in Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. In response to the false attacks on his company, Antonio Mugica, Smartmatic’s CEO, has retained a noted defamation lawyer, J. Erik Connolly, who has demanded retractions from Fox, Newsmax and One America News, and threatened the possibility of a lawsuit. Connolly knows just what he is doing: “We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this.”

NYS BOE is about to approve ESS Expressvote XL for NYS on January 7. New York City is ready to buy them as soon as certified. The article is from February but it is timely. Contact Gov Cuomo and the NYS Board of Elections and tell them you do not want to vote on a touchscreen voting machine. Allegra Dengler

Reliability of expensive new voting machines called into question CBS “…. researchers say: Voters could end up with printouts that accurately spell out the names of the candidates they picked, but, because of a hack, the bar codes do not reflect those choices. Because the bar codes are what's tabulated, voters would never know that their ballots benefited another candidate…. [expert Doug] Jones... today's ballot-marking devices undermine the very idea of retaining a paper record that can be used in audits and recounts. … Colorado, is banning bar codes from ballot-marking voting machines beginning in 2021….Northampton County, PA …Expressvote.. prevented votes cast for one of three candidates in a judge's race from registering in the bar codes used to count the vote...miscalibrated touchscreens, which can "flip" votes or simply make it difficult to vote for one's desired candidate due to faulty screen alignment. ...Election commissioners were livid, but unable to return the machines for a refund...Grassroots organizations including Common Cause are fighting to prevent their certification in New York State."

“... Republicans have directed their belated election-security ire almost exclusively at Dominion Voting. They have conspicuously given short shrift to America’s largest and arguably most corrupt voting machine vendor, Election Systems & Software, LLC (ES&S),...The GOP’s apparent blind spot for this and other problems involving ES&S is curious. Before the GOP began screaming “Dominion, Dominion, Dominion,” most of the negative press about the elections industry in the U.S. had for years focused on ES&S .... we cannot typically prove that election outcomes are wrong without conducting robust manual audits using hand marked paper ballots (with an exception for voters with disabilities). “

Australia: Cyber attacks on elections growing amid concern for Australia's political parties:

New research says Russia is the most prolific state actor engaging in online interference against democratic elections, followed by China, which has significantly increased its cyber arsenal over the past two years, while Iran and North Korea are also offenders. ...Australia has experienced a wave of cyber attacks from a sophisticated state-based actor this year…...All four countries have tried to interfere in the 2020 United States presidential election, using a combination of cyber attacks and online disinformation campaigns.

Washington Post: Federal investigators find evidence of previously unknown tactics used to penetrate government networks

For days, it has been clear that compromised software patches distributed by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds, were central to Russian efforts to gain access to U.S. government computer systems. But Thursday’s alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security said evidence suggested there was other malware used to initiate what the alert described as “a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”

COMMENT: How do we get to elections we can all believe in? For one thing, hand count the ballots handmarked by the voters in public to ascertain the accuracy of the electronic vote count. For another, move to independent non-partisan civil service administration of elections.. Most advanced democracies do.
Allegra Dengler

COMMENT: The Brindisi-Tenney election is yet another New York election where the true winner will never be known. The ballots are not 100% hand-counted. The disputed affidavit and absentee ballots are the only ballots to see the light of day. The votes fed into the scanners in early voting and on election day were counted by the scanners. There is no evidence that the scanners counted accurately. The good news is that the governor signed a bill taking effect in 2021 that would require an automatic 100% recount in races as close as this one. The bad news is that the election law also allows the recount to be done on scanners. Allegra Dengler

TDMS|RESEARCH "The fact that for the 2016 Republican Party primaries the vote counts matched the exit polls—with most misses within the margin of error for the polls and randomly distributed for and against candidate Trump—provide evidence that exit polls can be highly accurate….The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections. Countries such as Germany, Norway, Netherlands, France, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and many other countries protect the integrity and trust of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.”

Goldfeder: " Fortunately, the so-called nightmare scenarios that I and others incessantly wrote about[1] for the last two years ultimately did not come to pass,...It is worth reviewing the salient legal issues, though, to focus our attention on how we might reform the pertinent laws. After that, I will address a few of the more problematic New York election law issues…...Closer to Home, New York Remains a Minefield for Candidates and Voters...New Yorkers deserve a simpler, fairer and more efficient electoral system."

COMMENT: There’s another category of election skeptics, the show-me people like me. Why should we believe the results? Why should we trust technology to count our votes? Prove to us that the results were accurate. Let us watch the handmarked paper ballots handcounted on election night in the polling place like most advanced democracies do. Then we’ll all have elections we can believe in.
Allegra Dengler

"Calling former Vice President Joe Biden’s Nov. 3 victory over Trump “fraudulent,” the Ohio-based “We The People Convention” took out a full-page ad in the Washington Times on Tuesday urging Trump to “immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a re-vote.” That retired military leaders would push such measures would violate their oath to the Constitution, said Risa Brooks, civil-military relations expert at Marquette University.….“As general officers, these men spent long careers committed to defending the Constitution...Calling for martial law and a suspension of the Constitution is a direct violation of their oath to uphold it.””

"The election in New York’s 22nd Congressional District has underscored the perils of New York’s opaque and decentralized approach to administering elections, issues exacerbated in a race with razor-thin margins….The next hearing is scheduled for Monday in Oswego County, and the case could drag on if the judge orders local election boards to re-canvass the ballots. The judge could also approve a full manual recount, which isn’t triggered automatically in New York. (A new state law requiring recounts in races where the margin is 0.5 percent or less goes into effect next year.)”

President Trump on Wednesday released a 46-minute videotaped speech that denounced a “rigged” election and was filled with lies the day after his own attorney general joined election officials across the country in attesting to his defeat.

“..If this was an audit done under Georgia’s audit law, it can’t change the outcome. Therefore, by definition, it is not a risk-limiting audit, because it cannot limit the risk of certifying a wrong outcome unless it can correct the outcome. By definition, their process did not address the risk people that care about.”

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone: “...election boards should be placed under the state’s merit-based civil service system like other government agencies so hires aren’t just installed by party bosses as favors."

As President Trump continues to make unfounded claims of widespread election fraud, 59 of the world’s foremost experts on electronic voting are hitting back, saying that recent allegations of actual voting machine hacking “have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.”

[Comment: This is a time of great distrust in our elections. Trump supporters believe there was widespread “voter fraud” and that their candidate did not lose. Democrats are looking suspiciously at Senate and House results and are wondering how they lost down ballot races, suspecting election fraud, especially with the computerized vote count. Democracy can’t thrive without trust in elections. Allegra Dengler]

Zetter: "Without mechanisms to support election integrity, many things can undermine it — even something as basic as public perceptions. Candidates who ask for recounts often get labeled sore losers, and election integrity activists who seek investigations of irregularities are often mocked as conspiracy theorists. (Stein’s critics accused her of pursuing her recount effort as a fundraising ploy, and Trump dismissed it as a “scam.”) Meanwhile, the public and the news media tend to lose interest in elections once the horse race is done, especially if the victory margin is wide — even if that allows systemic problems to go unaddressed.”

Quote by Nate Silver:

“Nate Silver said he found it “a bit concerning” that there have now been significant polling misses “in the same direction” not only in 2016 and 2020 but also in the 2014 midterms (though not in 2018).”
https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/66057-focus-nate-silver-to-fivethirtyeight-critics-fk-you-we-did-a-good-job

Nate Silver to FiveThirtyEight Critics: 'F**k You, We Did a Good Job'
By Matt Wilstein, The Daily Beast
05 November 20

...Silver also pointed out that the only state where Biden led in the final polling averages and lost at this point was Florida, with North Carolina likely to follow. And Silver said he found it “a bit concerning” that there have now been significant polling misses “in the same direction” not only in 2016 and 2020 but also in the 2014 midterms (though not in 2018).

Maybe the polls were right. The only way to know if the vote totals, counted by computerized voting machines, are correct is to handcount 100% of ballots handmarked by the voter. Every US Senate race in the country should be 100% audited, counted by hand, to check on the accuracy of the vote count. Scanners are just as hackable as touchscreens. Our elections have been privatized by reliance on voting machine vendors who won't even disclose who owns them. It's past time to let voters have a look at the vote count of actual ballots to see for themselves who the people really voted for.

You didn’t hear this in the cable TV chatter: In the two years leading up to this election, Georgia’s GOP secretary of state quietly wiped away the voter registrations of 198,351 voters — based on false information.

Call it "The Great Purge" — overwhelmingly wiping away the voting rights of young voters and voters of color. In other words, voters who might be more likely to vote blue.