Scrutineers is developing materials for poll watchers to monitor elections. Join with a neighbor or two to train with Scrutineers to do this important work this year. www.scrutineers.org
"... there are powerful actions YOU can take to decrease the chances and impact of election tampering and voter suppression. ...if we want fair and accurate elections, we need to show up. Not only to vote, but to protect the right to vote and the right to have our votes counted accurately. "

Bradcast: .."The non-partisan group's 2022 report is titled "The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule." It follows on last year's, titled "Democracy Under Siege,”.... In both, the U.S. no longer even cracks the top 50 most "Free" countries anymore, based on the 25 indicators measured by the group of international experts who work with Freedom House, which, founded in 1941, describes itself as "the oldest American organization devoted to the support and defense of democracy around the world.”

COMMENT: The "Democracy at Risk” event in Larchment with David Pepper was cancelled due to one of the organizers getting covid. In the meantime, I recommend his book, "Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines ". "If you care about protecting democracy, then you need to know what's happening at the state level.“ One study recently ranked New York 47 out of 50 states. Those that want to restrict voting rights and security regularly point to New York as an example to emulate. The Democratic majority in New York has failed to enact laws to protect our ballots and strong audits adequate to detect wrong vote counts. The state legislature has still not acted to ban hybrid computerized voting machines that can print on your ballot after you cast it. Contact Governor Hochul to put passage of S309/A1115 to ban hybrids at the top of her list. Ukrainians are dying to protect democracy. The least we can do is make a phone call or two to protect it in New York. Allegra Dengler

USNEWS: House Panel Launches Probe of New Mexico 2020 Election Audit "The committee said it is looking into potential intimidation by volunteers from a conspiracist group who are going door to door canvassing voters in Otero County and asking intrusive questions."

ABQ Journal: NM has a solid record of election integrity "New Mexico election officials, were (and remain) recognized as leaders in the election integrity movement – in general and in the area of risk-limiting post-election auditing. …I would encourage the members of the newly formed “NM Election Audit Force” to take a look at these audit requirements. I believe these audit methods yield much better results than showing up on a voter’s doorstep and asking who they voted for. These confrontations only serve to lessen the public’s confidence in elections."

Bradblog: "We've got to turn this around," Sancho insists. "ALL legal citizens should have the right to vote accessibly, and have that vote counted as they intended, and then we should audit the elections to confirm the validity of that election. That's as simple as it can be, and yet we're very far away from that, as you know.”

COMMENT: AP: “I don’t really think that in this day and age we need to go back to hand-counting where it’s so susceptible to human error,” she said. “We’ve got to start trusting electronics and computers.”

This comment illustrates the problem for people all across the political spectrum. Why in the world should we trust computers? They fail all the time. Our computerized voting machines are even less secure than most. They are a known target of Russian interference. (Mueller report) No-one knows who owns the voting machines companies. If our elected officials and election administrators can’t get it right and don’t get the message that we need stringent hand count audits of ballots to check if the computers counted right, maybe we should just go to all paper ballot hand-counted elections. Things are so bad in New York that counties are buying voting machines that can print on your ballot after you cast it, invalidating or changing your vote. In those counties, we don’t even have any verifiable hand marked ballots to count.

COMMENT: (Ukraine: Fancy Bear) This is a reminder from 2014 of the potential of Russian hackers to infiltrate election systems. As Robert Mueller answered in a question about whether Russians are still working to undermine our US elections, “They are doing it as we speak.” To protect our vote count from cyberattack, there must be paper ballots hand marked by the voter and paper poll books. In New York, support S309/A1115 to ban printer-scanner voting machines that can change or invalidate ballots. Allegra Dengler

The Mueller report underscored the urgency of fixing our nation’s election security gaps before 2020. Here we are in 2022. The Freedom to Vote Act was killed by two Democrats and 50 Republicans this year. Key gaps in election integrity and security are still imbedded in our election infrastructure.

Despite these warnings, New York is certifying new voting machines that can print on your ballot after you cast it. The printer can mark additional candidates to invalidate it. Or it could fill in races you did not vote in. And you would never know. Westchester County has already purchased voting machines that do this (the Dominion ICE).

Walden: “..we must renew the drive to make our democracy a national mission again.”

There is now strong and urgent bipartisan support for new federal grants and oversight to safeguard vulnerable state voting infrastructure and promote voter verified paper ballots and non-partisan audits

• The letter from Republicans is notable as federal election standards and funding has traditionally been a Democratic issue

• Unfortunately, the battle for political advantage in coming elections have delayed these truly non-partisan issues and sidelined debate on balanced legislative proposals in the US Senate

Michigan’s "redistricting commission has pulled off something remarkable. Despite a flurry of legal action and very public disputes between members, it has produced some of the fairest maps in the US. How did it manage it – and will the maps survive?
...MICRC, and the approach it epitomizes, came about thanks to Katie Fahey, a Michigan resident and political novice who posted a message on Facebook two days after the 2016 presidential election. She said she wanted to take on gerrymandering and eventually recruited more than 14,000 volunteers to campaign for an amendment to the state’s constitution. It passed with 61% of the vote and created the commission, one of the most successful ways to unrig the redistricting process so far and a potential model for other states.”

BradBlog: “Lynn Bernstein ...went public last month on Twitter with some of the threats she began to face after she (a registered and active Democrat) found common ground with the state's Libertarian Party. She helped convince them to exercise their right, under state law, to seek an independent source code and security review of ES&S' unverifiable BMD voting and tabulation systems…. "North Carolina law says that a voter must be able to verify their ballot before casting it. With ES&S's barcode system, it doesn't actually allow the voter to verify their vote before casting it.”

COMMENT: This sounds familiar. New York has a law like that. But If New York doesn’t pass a law banning hybrid voting machines (S309A/A1115A Protect Our Vote Act), New York City Board of Elections has signaled its intent to purchase this type of voting machine.. Allegra Dengler

MSN: “Georgia voters face an extreme risk that [ballot marking device]-based attacks could manipulate their individual votes and alter election outcomes,” Halderman said of the secret report in a signed declaration last year,....”

Reuters: "We see what happened in the insurrection," said Manchin, who is leading the Democratic side of the bipartisan effort. "We're going to get a bunch of people together, Democrats and Republicans, and get a good piece of legislation that protects the counting of the vote….Manchin said he wants threatening or accosting an election official to be a federal crime….senators said there could be scope to meet the 60-vote threshold with more limited legislation aimed at curbing congressional intervention in presidential elections through ECA reform…. [Electoral Count Act]

"The people who tried to overturn the last election focused on using that act in a way that would have subverted the will of the people. And so there's interest in clarifying the act," Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a member of the Collins group, told reporters.”The Collins group is also considering proposals to protect elected officials from harassment and unwarranted removal from office, address election security and improve election management, according to a person familiar with the matter."

Times Union: “... we don’t agree with opening ballots weeks before election day, which could reduce public scrutiny of the process, and risks signaling prematurely how an election is going. Nor do we agree with making it easier for political operatives of any persuasion to manipulate the absentee ballot process. People put things in the mail, and order all sorts of things on line, with no assistance from anyone. What, we have to wonder, is so unusual about absentee ballots that they need the help of some party official or volunteer to request? In cases of a severe disability that makes filing a ballot request impossible, special procedures can surely be carved out.

Rick Hasen. Vox
“...The 2020 election showed numerous paths for trying to manipulate election outcomes,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California Irvine and the author of Election Meltdown and the forthcoming Cheap Speech. “And although the system barely held last time, because we had some heroic people, including heroic Republicans, there’s good reason to believe a lot of those people will no longer be in office at the time of the next election,” he said.
...I think this issue is the subversion issue, not voter suppression. The biggest impact of these false beliefs on the part of Republicans about a stolen election on 2022 is that they make it more likely that those who will be running elections in 2024 will be people who embrace the “big lie.”
...I think the most immediate threat — and this is the point I’ve been trying to drive home as an even greater risk than voter suppression, which is a real problem — is this risk of stolen elections or election subversion. This is something I never expected to have to worry about in the contemporary United States but here we are. It’s a risk that the true election winner will not get declared the winner.
...I’ve said before, I feel kind of like a climate scientist or an epidemiologist. This is what I do. I study this stuff all day every day and my warning lights are flashing red. You look at people who study the rise of authoritarianism and transitions from democracy in other countries — they’ve reached the same conclusion.
...I think people who try to minimize the risks are just in denial or not paying attention.
...And Democrats, it’s more of a mystery to me as to why they don’t see the house on fire like I do. You’ll have to ask them. There’s been a reluctance to separate out the question of subversion from voting rights.
...What the future holds is uncertain. A lot of the opportunities that may have been available in Congress seem to be closing. I think what we need to think about is what we as individuals can do to shore up our election system. I don’t know that any legislative solution is going to be forthcoming, and the danger to our election system is real. So it may take mass peaceful protests and organizing in order to assure that we have fair elections in the future.

New York Times: "Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world….Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.”

Tennessee Star: "The most significant change the bill contains is the removal of certain types of voting machines. “A county election commission shall not use voting machines or ballot marking devices. Each county election commission shall use hand-marked paper ballots, which must be counted using an optical ballot scanner.”

Jennifer Cohn: "…unscrupulous Republican “fixers,” including Roger Stone, deflected by falsely accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election. In the years since, these same fixers have emerged again and again to deceive voters with faulty narratives that have helped empower right wing extremists, including the Religious Right. …Bush (2000) opposed any manual recount at all. His legal team included three future Supreme Court justices: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett...A consortium of eight news agencies .. found that a manual recount of all machine-rejected ballots throughout the state ...would have produced a narrow Gore victory…. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which allocated $3 billion to replace punch card machines with new voting machines. HAVA allowed the new machines to be entirely paperless, making manual recounts impossible…..In 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans might use paperless voting machines to steal elections...Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer were the only Senators who opposed HAVA…."

A communication from the Guardian requesting donations.
"This is an entirely new threat. This is not voting suppression or gerrymandering... What is now taking shape across America is the machinery necessary to steal an election….Last week, Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, said about Trumpists targeting official positions with electoral oversight: “This is a five-alarm fire. If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in 2024.... in Pennsylvania “Stop the Steal” supporters have triumphed in races to become judges of elections in their local precincts. Yes, a “Stop the Steal” supporter will be overseeing the 2024 election [in PA].””