"The Republican legislature and governor have made a breathtaking assertion of partisan power in elections…
The Republican-controlled legislature has more control over the State Election Board.
The secretary of state is removed as a voting member of the State Election Board.
The G.O.P.-led legislature is empowered to suspend county election officials."
Palast: "True the Vote, ..founded by Tea Party.., challenged the right of 364,541 Georgians to cast ballots. "County elections boards, facing threats by the ACLU and Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight, rejected the challenges, noting that the numbers were too huge to be credible. One voter can challenge another if they have personal knowledge that the other voter is a fraud. The local shills used by the Texas group knew nothing of those they challenged…..However, the new Georgia law specifically authorizes unlimited challenges. And Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State has gleefully invited True the Vote to attack voter rolls...But won’t those same county boards kick out any new absurd challenges? The MAGA mob in the legislature has got that covered. Under the new law, the State Board of Elections can remove a county board if it doesn’t, in the state’s opinion, rule properly on these challenges.
COMMENT: Two races, same result. In very close races in Iowa and New York, there were discrepancies in the machine count that needed a hand count to resolve. In both cases the Democratic candidate sued and requested a hand count of the ballots. In both cases, judges denied their request. In both cases, the Republican was seated in Congress. Who did the people actually vote for? It may never be known. Allegra Dengler
“Despite our best efforts to have every vote counted, the reality is that the toxic campaign of political disinformation to attack this constitutional review of the closest congressional contest in 100 years has effectively silenced the voices of Iowans,” Hart said.
COMMENT: Too bad those “dozens to hundreds influenced by ... unsubstantiated allegations that the machines were hacked" don’t see the real problem. There are many acceptable Dominion voting machines, but the ImageCast X touchscreen is a TOUCHSCREEN. Like the ESS Expressvote XL that the New York State Board of Elections is working to certify, a voter’s ballot disappears as soon as they hit “cast”. The “paper record” records whatever the computer tells it to. If the voter doesn’t look extremely closely, they have just pushed the “permission to cheat” button. Why are Ohio Democrats pushing for more touchscreens? Allegra Dengler
SUMMARY:
OHIO: CANTON The Stark County Board of Elections moved Friday to initiate a lawsuit against the county commissioners if they don't approve funding to buy Dominion voting machines by their regular board meeting next week.
“The US slipped, again, in a global ranking of political freedoms, putting it on par with Panama, Romania and Croatia, and Mongolia. Over the last decade, the US has fallen 11 points…Dropping 11 points is unusual, especially for an established democracy, because they tend to be more stable in our scores…Americans should see it as a wake-up call.”
Today, 56 years after Bloody Sunday, President Biden signed an executive order “to promote voting access and allow all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.” He called on Congress to pass the For the People Act, making it easier to vote, and to restore the Voting Rights Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act after the man who went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia, bearing the scars of March 7, 1965, until he died on July 17, 2020.
Comment: It’s not the candidate that lost here, but the 2400 voters whose applications were not processed, and all the voters who will never know if their ballots were accurately counted by the scanners.
Allegra Dengler
Syracuse: "“I hope some higher authority comes in and investigates what I think is a massive disenfranchisement of voters in the district,” Brindisi told syracuse.com in his first interview since conceding the election….“I hope the state investigates because there were clear violations of state and federal election laws,” Brindisi said. “The most fundamental right of Americans is the right to vote, and they were denied that by the incompetence of the Oneida County Board of Elections….Brindisi said he’s confident that he would have prevailed in the election if his request had been granted for a full, manual hand count of all ballots….DelConte denied that request. Brindisi’s last option would have been to ask the House of Representatives to intervene and conduct a recount under the Federal Contested Elections Act.”
Adversaries of democracy are trying to compromise our elections. In 2016, Russian intelligence agents gained access to local election board networks. These attacks have continued. We must fortify our systems.
Many election jurisdictions have purchased voting systems with wireless modems under false representations from the vendors who claimed that the modems don't connect to the internet. This is untrue. These modems directly connect election systems to the internet, exposing election infrastructure to cyber-attacks.
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
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.