UTICA: "DelConte ruled against a Brindisi request for a hand recount of all ballots in the race, lifting a temporary restraining order on certifying the results with his Friday decision. Under a new state law, the margin in the race would have triggered an automatic recount, but the election predated the law’s Jan. 1 effective date. “

COMMENT: Again, voters will never know who actually got the most votes in this race because again a judge ruled against any 100% hand count. The court refused a hand count despite the ineptitude of the Oneida Board of Elections in an "election and counting process riddled with errors, with inconsistencies and systematic violations of state and federal election laws” (Brindisi) . Fortunately, this is the last time this will happen in a close election, since a new law requires an automatic hand count in close elections like this. Thanks to all who advocated for that law, it’s a very important first step. There’s more work to do, though, since there are races that fall outside that margin that will not get 100% hand counts. And if the new Expressvote XL is certified (possibly as early as tomorrow Feb 10), the hand counters will not be looking at ballots the voters marked themselves, but computer generated tapes with barcodes. It’s time to get the voting machines out of the way and let the people mark their own ballots and count all the votes by hand. Allegra Dengler

Time: "It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable demo”

COMMENT: Thanks to all on this list that did their part to protect democracy this perilous election season. Whether you contributed to efforts like Fair Fight Action, made phone calls to inform voters of their rights and urge them to vote, went to rallies or just waited patiently for all the votes to be counted, your being there for democracy made a difference. "“It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. “It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”"

The only way to have elections that can’t be hacked is to do what most advanced democracies and some US counties do. Count the hand marked paper ballots by hand on election night in the poll site. Until decision-makers wake up to how vulnerable our elections are, making incremental progress to ban hybrid voting machines and implement good audits is necessary. But in light of emerging cyberthreats, now is the time to remove the hackable technology from between the voter’s ballot and the vote count. Allegra Dengler

Email the four U.S. Election Assistance Commissioners and tell them to restore the full ban on wireless in voting machines in the new voting system guidelines.

WAPO: As Trump spreads falsehoods, one voting machine company cynically attacks its honest critics.

"But although the conspiracy theories are nonsense, that doesn’t mean there’s anything unreasonable about mistrusting voting machines, about which experts have been sounding the alarm for years.,,,

"As the nation recoils from the smear job that Trump loyalists have unleashed on Dominion Voting, one of Dominion’s competitors, the industry-leading, private-equity-owned ES&S, has seized on the moment to threaten members of SMART Elections, a journalism and advocacy group, with a lawsuit for spreading “false, defamatory and disparaging” information about one of its machines, the ExpressVote XL. These claims — factual observations, really — include that the machine “can add, delete, or change the votes on individual ballots” and that it is a “bad voting machine.”

"Because SMART Elections is a collective of committed, individual activists — who translate academic research and relay it to state regulators — ES&S threatened to hold the members of the group “personally and individually liable”: ominous threats coming from any large company, but one that might especially worry activists, given ES&S’s history of litigiousness. (ES&S, a company that makes billions by charging the public millions to count its votes, is such a habitual litigant that sometimes it seems like the voting machines are a sideline for the lawsuits.)”

“...Monopolists with defective products have a reliable way to address those defects: shoot the messenger. By choosing to bully its critics in the midst of Dominion’s legal wranglings with Trumpland’s wildest conspiracists, ES&S obscures that its machines are shoddy while painting itself as a brave fighter against Giuliani’s war on electoral integrity.”

New York State Board of Elections is considering joining this "troubling trend” and certifying the ESS Expressvote XL discussed in this article. Let Governor Cuomo know you do not want the ESS Expressvote XL certified for New York.
The bottom line A Trusted System “Canada, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, among others, all use paper ballots and hand counting.”
What we are threatened with: Problems with ES&S Machines...Wrong Machine Votes...Experts Issue Warning...Kentucky Uses ExpressVote...Foreign Snooping...Vendors over Voters?

Congress: With victories in Georgia's Senate runoffs, congressional Democrats now have the opportunity to pass the most important set of voting and election reforms since the historic Voting Rights Act was adopted in 1965. These reforms face a challenging path to passage given Democrats' narrow majorities, but their adoption is critical for preserving American democracy amid unprecedented attacks upon it by Republican extremists both in and outside Congress.

Chief among these proposals is the reintroduction of H.R. 1, the "For the People Act," which House Democrats passed in 2019 and would enact groundbreaking reforms by (1) removing barriers to expanding access to voting and securing the integrity of the vote; (2) establishing public financing in House elections to level the playing field; and (3) banning congressional gerrymandering by requiring that every state create a nonpartisan redistricting commission subject to nonpartisan redistricting criteria.

ExpressVote XL users select their picks on a touch screen, suboptimal in a germophobic age. Then, to comply with the requirement of a permanent paper record, the machine prints a little grocery store receipt that is visible behind a see-through plastic covering. If the voter determines that the receipt is correct, the vote is cast. If it’s wrong, the vote is canceled. But while the screen shows multiple languages, the stupid machine can only print in English. Ay, caramba.

Barron’s: "A secure election gets the right outcome and convinces the public. No matter what candidate they vote for, every American should be concerned about gaps in the evidence to support the reported outcome. Official assurances without public evidence do not persuade skeptics, and a lack of public confidence in the machinery of elections is an existential threat to our democracy. "

Summary: "Elections are important to anoint winners, but even more important to assuage the losers and thereby maintain a civil society.
..The assertion that “this was the most secure election in U.S. history” repeated quite literally ad nauseum is Orwellian Newspeak. By almost any meaningful measure, the 2020 election appears the least secure; for extent and creative variety of security shortcomings, one would be hard pressed to find an historical equal.
..In 2004 (Bush v Kerry), U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr., former chair of the House Judiciary Committee wrote,
… More than simply reflecting the desires of the majority, Alexander Hamilton insisted that the electoral process afford a “moral certainty.” Elections needed to convey a sense of fairness and finality if the fledgling democracy was to survive.
...In the current context, such moral certainty may sound like a tall order, but in fact, it’s remarkably easy. All it takes to disprove election fraud is to do what every actual democracy — Germany[ii], Norway, Netherlands, France[iii], Canada[iv], United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and many others — actually does [5a]: (Handmarked paper ballots hand counted in the precinct on election night)
...You shouldn’t have to presume a fair count. The mainstream media has … established … a Catch-22 for election investigation. No investigation without proof — but then, what proof can be had without investigation?

Send an email to the NYS Board of Elections asking them to REJECT CERTIFICATION OF THE EXPRESSVOTE XL VOTING MACHINE. The NYS Board of Elections may vote as early as this Thursday January 7.

Assemblywomen Galef and Paulin Request Postponement of Certification for New Voting Machines
Their Letter Sent to the NYS Board of Elections Signed by Eleven Additional Assemblymembers

“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.”