..."The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster.

Philadelphia Inquirer: "That means Finchem — not just a garden-variety Trumpist but a member of the extremist Oath Keepers who was on the Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 insurrection — could be Arizona’s chief vote counter if and when the bleats of voter fraud and a stolen election again emerge from Mar-a-Lago in three years.

"Be very afraid.

…."A stunning report last week by the Reuters news service found that 10 of the 15 top Republicans running for secretary of state in five key battleground states — where the post, unlike Pennsylvania, is an elected position — “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.” Several of these candidates have already been Trump-endorsed, including Arizona’s Finchem but also Georgia Congressman Jody Hice, who is running to get rid of Raffensperger and called Jan. 6 “our 1776 moment.”

...So while, yes, Pennsylvania’s governor’s race will be important for the usual reasons like education funding or the fate of fracking, this time around voters are essentially tasked with preserving America’s 245-year experience with democracy ... or not. We need to listen with great care to what former conservatives like Robert Kagan or Steve Schmidt are trying to tell us. The future of the United States, and its vital yet imperfect promises of liberty, are at the edge of a cliff, looking over the edge. We must seize this moment to pull it back.

“They did it in the dark of night,” she said. “Those systems have been compromised in the name of a so-called forensic audit.”...Boockvar’s successor decertified Fulton County’s equipment in July...Andino will soon begin as director of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the federally backed operation, run by CIS, that helps state and local governments secure their voting-related IT systems and distributes threat intelligence to election officials and their cybersecurity colleagues.”

"Jena Griswold, ... Colorado's top elections official, said the secretary-of-state races reflect a much broader exploitation of phony voter-fraud claims by Republicans seeking all levels of elected office. "That is ‘code red’ for democracy," she said in an interview.”

“I am appalled by this violation of my privacy,” said Dante de Blasio, a registered Democrat, via a spokesman for his father, the mayor. “My main concern is not that people will know who I voted for, but rather that the B.O.E. has repeatedly shown complete incompetence and still hasn’t been reformed by the state. Hundreds of my fellow voters have had their right to a private ballot violated by the B.O.E.’s blatant carelessness. Enough is enough."

Jonathan Simon "The 2020 election provided a trove of provocative data: disparities, anomalies, and bizarre patterns that more than exceeded what we, as pursuers of electoral forensics, have come to recognize as the norm. But none of the data supports former President Donald Trump’s claims, and virtually all of it points in the precise opposite direction: in both the presidential and critical down-ballot contests (US House, Senate, state legislatures), the red shift (when vote counts come out to the right of poll-based or other baselines) was egregious and pervasive. “

“Copies of Dominion Voting Systems softwares used for designing ballots, configuring voting machines and tallying results were distributed at an event this month in South Dakota organized by the MyPillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has made unsubstantiated claims about last year’s election….The release gives hackers a “practice environment” to probe for vulnerabilities and a road map to avoid defenses, Hursti said….The door is now wide open,” Hursti said. “The only question is, how do you sneak in the door?”

Denver Post:…" a Republican county clerk in Colorado has been accused of allowing unauthorized access to voting machine passwords that ended up on the social media account of a QAnon leader.”
Colorado Pol: What Did Mesa County’s Q-razy Clerk Do?...it is not at all inconceivable that Clerk Peters might have given an outside party passwords or the means to obtain them in order to prove the conspiracy theory she has already alleged involving Dominion Voting Systems...it’s another stunning case of Republicans wishing so hard for election fraud they have to do it themselves.”

Daily Beast: "A judge in a Georgia election security lawsuit is working to tamp down voting machine conspiracy theories. But sealing a court file could stoke the controversy even more.

...It’s the kind of report that could be weaponized by those looking to cast doubt on U.S. election results: a cybersecurity analysis that found flaws in Georgia’s voting machines and warns about the potential for future attacks. But a federal judge has sealed the report, and her attempt to shield the public from bad faith efforts to undermine the 2020 election could instead fuel the conspiracy theory dumpster fires—and keep the voting machine maker from figuring out how to fix it.

From Susan Greenhalgh
“ Recently, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) deleted key provisions in proposed federal voting security standards to allow the inclusion of wireless networking devices, significantly degrading the security of our voting systems. We uncovered that this was done at the urging of voting machine manufacturers"

“Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen."

That's what President Donald Trump told Justice Department officials as part of his insistent pressure campaign to declare the 2020 election “corrupt” so he and his Republican cronies in Congress could overturn the results and keep him in office, according to notes of a conversation released Friday by a House committee. We may be used to this happening in other countries, yet many Americans believe it could never happen here. It’s shocking – but, unfortunately, not surprising, at least to us.

USA Today: “...most Americans ..believe that the nation is perfectly capable of ensuring both ample voter access and valid elections results, and this is what we should do…. the United States can and should make sure voting is both highly accessible and highly secure….there is a great deal more common ground among the American people than there is among politicians to put core democratic values over partisanship….For the good of our democracy, I hope the public’s majority view becomes powerful enough that politicians are forced to listen and respond.”

WAPO: "Polling in senatorial and gubernatorial races showed a similar pattern, overstating the margin for Democratic candidates versus their Republican opponents. When state-level presidential polls were removed from the sample, the error level was even higher. For example, polling pointed to possible Democratic gains in House races. Instead, Republicans gained seats.”

COMMENT by Allegra Dengler:

The most likely reason for the discrepancy is that the polls were right. Since we got computerized vote-counting, election result polls have been off. Why do we assume it is the polls and not the computerized vote count that is wrong? WAPO should investigate why there are so few legitimate handcount audits adequate to determine if the voting machines counted right. In these days of cyberattacks and weakly guarded election infrastructure and plain old voting machine breakdown, there is every reason to hand count the ballots to check on the machines. A significant number of voting machines are running on Windows 7, which is no longer supported by Microsoft as of January 2020. How is that secure?

MYRIE: The New York City Board of Elections is one of many across the state that has challenges and issues and so I'm excited to announce breaking news on your program today that the Senate is going to be holding a number of hearings throughout the state to tackle this issue. What we're going to do is something a little different than what we've seen in hearings past, we're going to go out to Syracuse and Rochester. We're going to hear from Westchester, Hudson Valley, Long Island voters about what they think should be changed, and so it won't just be a panel of experts and folks who work in this space regularly, but we really want to hear from the voters.

"Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins... described the recent errors on the part of the New York City Board of Elections... a “national embarrassment” and pledged to hold legislative hearings this summer to develop reform proposals. ...The first State Senate hearing is expected to take place at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn on July 28th with additional hearings scheduled for other localities in the final week of July and first week in August. ...“We're going to go out to Syracuse and Rochester. We're going to hear from Westchester, Hudson Valley, and Long Island voters about what they think should be changed,” said Myrie.

New Yorker: "Even in a state that has long been considered, by those who keep track of such things, one of the worst in the country when it comes to election administration—the basic civic business of collecting and counting votes—New York City stands out.

...On Wednesday morning, advocates of election reform held a conference call with reporters to emphasize that the board’s error wasn’t related to ranked-choice voting. “The discrepancy was due to human error, not any problem with the scanners, or the ranked-choice voting technology—this was a mistake by a low-level junior staffer,” Susan Lerner, the executive director of the New York chapter of Common Cause, an advocacy group, said...” (A Board of Elections spokesperson later confirmed to me that a junior staff member in Queens had forgotten to hit “clear” in the vote-counting software.)

...Lerner and other reformers have advocated for taking control of the board out of the hands of party officials, and professionalizing the system by hiring nonpartisan election administrators. But lawmakers in both Albany and New York City have largely ignored these calls... Stu Loeser, who served as Michael Bloomberg’s spokesperson when he attempted to push such reforms as mayor, compared incumbent lawmakers’ resistance to election reform to the N.R.A.’s opposition to gun-control laws.

WAPO: "Suraj Patel, a two-time primary challenger to Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), cried foul last year after postal workers in Brooklyn failed to stamp some absentee-ballot envelopes with the date — a requirement in New York. When he cried foul, Maloney’s campaign, which had declared victory, demanded that he “concede that the voters have spoken and stop validating Trump’s undermining our democratic processes.”...Responses like that, Patel said, were mostly helpful to Trump and his party, by blocking the momentum to enact real improvements in city elections. Now, the city has lived through yet another problem-plagued election — and given Republicans yet another argument “to justify more fake audits and more anti-voting laws,” Patel said.”

"...Trump’s claim that the true results of the primary “will never be known,” for instance, is demonstrably untrue, Norden said — because New York uses paper ballots that can be individually hand-tallied if necessary."

NYTimes: "New York is the only state in the country with local election boards whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses, and the board in New York City illustrates the pitfalls.

NYTimes: "“If you’re an upset voter tonight, I hear you,” Mr. Myrie, who leads the Senate’s Elections Committee, wrote on Twitter. “We have to do better for you. And we will. Stay tuned for a hearing date and bring all the energy, concerns, and ideas for change to the table. We stand ready to listen and where possible, implement.””

New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary was thrust into chaos on Tuesday night after the city’s Board of Elections released, then withdrew a new tally of votes after saying it accidentally included 135,000 test ballots in its preliminary figures.