Comment: To regain trust in elections, there must be hand count audits of 100% of hand marked paper ballots with the public watching. Despite failures in other states and widespread public distrust, touchscreen voting machines are currently in the process of being certified by the NYS Board of Elections. Don’t let this happen! Let your NYS legislator know that you support S309/A1115 which will BAN hybrid touchscreen printer-scanners.

Allegra Dengler

Summary:
WAPO: Republicans aren’t just making it harder to vote. They’re going after election officials, too.
“...Far less noticed, however, have been provisions in these laws that penalize local election officials who administer our elections….
Iowa, in addition to limiting voter access by cutting early voting days and forbidding local election officials from mailing out absentee ballot request forms without a specific request from a voter, will now make it a crime if election workers violate the new rules. Florida has enacted a rule that limits ballot drop box availability to only during early voting hours, and provides that, “If any drop box at an early voting site is left accessible for the return of ballots outside of early voting hours, the supervisor is subject to a civil penalty of $25,000.” A Texas proposed bill would subject a local registrar to fines if the registrar fails to mail out notices demanding proof of citizenship to individuals otherwise deemed ineligible to vote. It would also criminalize election workers who “distance or obstruct the view of a [poll] watcher in a way that makes observation reasonably ineffective.” Arizona legislators want to make it a felony for an election worker to mail an early ballot to a voter who has not requested one.
...Election officials were already under immense pressure during and after the 2020 election. Death threats to these officials abound...The predictable result? Many election officials, burned out after the 2020 election experience, are leaving their jobs.”

NYTimes May 6, 2021: Arizona Review of 2020 Vote Is Riddled With Flaws, Says Secretary of State
Summary: "Untrained citizens are trying to find traces of bamboo on last year’s ballots, seemingly trying to prove a conspiracy theory that the election was tainted by fake votes from Asia. Thousands of ballots are left unattended and unsecured. People with open partisan bias, including a man who was photographed on the Capitol steps during the Jan. 6 riot, are doing the recounting….The effort has no official standing and will not change the state’s vote, whatever it finds….“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” wrote Pamela Karlan, the principal deputy assistant attorney general with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division."

"We are very concerned that the auditors are engaged in ongoing and imminent violations of federal voting and election laws.”

"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.”

Bellaire, Mich. – A northern Michigan county that was sued over its counting of the fall election will count paper ballots by hand in the May 4 primary.

From ballot stuffing and intimidating voters, to buying votes, suppressing turnout and manipulating returns, "Deliver the Vote" is an intensive examination into the hidden interiors of American politics that casts a provocative new light on how power in America is often obtained.

Has the New York State Board of Elections been informed about this vulnerability during the on-going certification process for the ES&S Expressvote XL in New York?

Allegra Dengler

NYTimes: "Efforts by Russian hackers to gain access to state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.”

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.

"‘Voting rights is preservative of all other rights, and we have to do everything we can to preserve the voices of the people in our democracy,’ said Senator Raphael Warnock, Georgia Democrat.”

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