“Insider threat, while always part of the threat matrix, is now a reality in elections,” said Matt Masterson, who previously served as a senior U.S. cybersecurity official tracking 2020 election integrity for the Department of Homeland Security.“

... the Coalition for Good Governance .. plaintiffs argue that the state’s election system is so insecure that it violates the rights of voters. In a portion of a recorded phone call, a man identified in court papers as Hall claimed to have arranged for a plane to take people to Coffee County to copy data on voting equipment… they “went in there and imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment” and scanned ballots. “We basically had the entire elections committee there,” he added. “And they said: ‘We give you permission. Go for it.’”

..In the audio recording, Hall described the people responsible for copying hard drives in Coffee County as “the same people that went up to Michigan and did all that forensic stuff on the computers.”...In December 2020, plaintiffs in a lawsuit in Antrim County, Mich., were permitted by a state judge to copy Dominion voting equipment."

COMMENT; Does this meant that Republican operatives now have the underlying computer code that runs the voting machines and counts the votes in Georgia, and possibly other states using Dominion voting machines? Without hand counting paper ballots hand marked by voters adequate to detect miscounts, there is no way to verify that the voting machines counted right. Stalin: “It’s not who votes, it’s who counts the votes” Allegra Dengler

NY Redistricting: New York's highest court struck down the state's new maps for Congress and the state Senate on Wednesday, ruling in a bitterly divided 4-3 opinion that lawmakers did not have the authority to take over the redistricting process after the state's bipartisan redistricting commission failed to agree on new districts. The Court of Appeals ordered the trial court handling the case to work with a special master to adopt replacement maps "with all due haste" and suggested that primaries for affected races be moved from June to August.

Keep hybrid voting machines out of New York. They can print on your ballot after you cast it, changing your vote.

Comment: With a significant presidential election taking place in France, it’s interesting to take a look at how their elections are conducted.

The Intercept. "At the center of the failure was the Brennan Center, which bucked local election officials and told Congress to focus on matters other than election funding.... the Brennan Center [has] effective veto power over the voting rights advocacy coalition it leads. In Congress, revisions to election and voting laws are often met with the question, “What does the Brennan Center think?”\

In a letter sent to congressional leadership in late July, a coalition of 19 national advocacy groups, including the NAACP, ... urged Congress to allocate $20 billion for election infrastructure, citing the hundreds of local election officials, mayors, and secretaries of state who had begged for that amount earlier in the month. “As the individuals and leaders closest to the administration of fair and secure elections, they have collectively called for federal support in meeting the immense needs they face,” the national groups wrote. “We write to add our voices to that important ask"….The Brennan Center declined to sign.

..Meanwhile, as the voting rights package remains in limbo, the new year has brought momentum to the issue of addressing election subversion, or the threat that the true winner of an election will not be declared the winner.“
...Election funding and election subversion are not unrelated issues. While immediate fears about subversion have been tied to rogue election clerks and state legislators, poorly funding elections heightens risk too. “Inadequately funded elections can lead to foreign or domestic actors tampering with our voting technology, voter registration databases, or machines that count ballots,” said Hasen. “And when funding is inadequate it creates opportunities for mistakes to happen and creates opportunities for people to try to manipulate things without oversight.”"

A New York judge on Thursday struck down the state’s new congressional and legislative maps as defying a voter-backed constitutional amendment that aimed to end partisan gerrymandering, dealing a blow to Democrats hoping to hold onto their fragile majority in the House this November.

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."