Times Union: SUMMARY: "New York elections could soon be at risk of getting hacked, after lobbyists, the NAACP and the Assembly elections committee chair teamed up to kill a bill banning certain voting machines.
After passing the Senate on May 31, the bill, sponsored by state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, D-Brooklyn, and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, D-Westchester, seemed like a solid bet for passage in the Assembly, since it was sponsored by nearly half of the Assembly’s Democrats, as well as several Republicans.

New York elections could soon be more vulnerable to hacks, after lobbyists, the NAACP, and the Assembly elections committee chair teamed up to kill an election security bill.

Finally! Top U.S. Cybersecurity Agency Issues Warning About Touchscreen Voting Dangers” …"The vulnerabilities, according to CISA, could allow manipulation of results in a way that would not necessarily be discovered by most security provisions employed by most jurisdictions which use these terrible types of voting systems. Halderman told AP that he believes it is not only the systems made by Dominion that are vulnerable. Similar touchscreen systems made by ES&S, the nation's largest vendor, are used in many more states across the country, or by Smartmatic, whose touchscreen BMDs are now forced on voters at the polling place here in Los Angeles County, the nation's largest single voting jurisdiction. They all have many of the same design flaws, such as the use of barcodes/QRCodes to tally ballots printed out by the systems, ignoring the human-readable selections printed on the same ballot paper that may or may not have been correctly verified by the voter.”

News from all over.

Good news; the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York passed at the last minute.
Bad news: the bill to preserve our hand-marked paper ballots by banning hybrid voting machines did not pass. A1115. Voters will not know if their ballots are counted as cast in counties that purchase these machines. Counties like Westchester have already purchased them and there are now no plans to retire them. These machines undermine the integrity of any audit to verify the machines count.

Good-government groups and election security experts are sounding the alarm bells about new electronic voting machines that may soon come to New York. The state Board of Elections as early as this summer may approve touch-screen electronic voting machines that have come under scrutiny in other states. In a new letter to state leaders, election security experts from around the country as well as organizations that advocate for fair elections made the case for lawmakers to approve legislation that would ban the machines before the end of this year’s legislative session on June 2.

Did GOP Election Officials Facilitate Voting System Software Theft in Coffee County, Georgia? "Certainly they were violating state and federal laws," Marks tells me. "The difficult part of this is It puts virtually all states that are using the Dominion system --- without doing thorough audits and [using] hand-marked paper ballots --- it puts all of these at risk. "The system has been breached," Marks cautions chillingly, before explaining what must be done now to safeguard our elections --- including from insider election officials who have now put our entire democracy at very serious risk. Even hand-marked paper ballots, she notes, are still tabulated by these same computer systems.””

COMMENT: New York uses such voting machines. The New York legislature is about to adjourn without creating strong automatic audits, or banning voting machines that print your ballot for you (no more hand-marked paper ballots in counties that buy them). We are at the mercy of the voting machines to get the vote count right, but the Dominion proprietary voting system software is now in the hands of Republican party operatives. Allegra Dengler

COMMENT: Lest we forget. Despite red flags in the 2020 election, federal legislation to regulate the private, proprietary, secret voting machine companies have failed. (the PAVE Act, Protecting American Votes and Elections Act of 2019, the SAFE Act, Securing America's Federal Elections Act 2020). We still have the same “revolving door between government officials and ES&S.”"Owned by a private equity firm, ES&S has been elusive about identifying the people in its ownership”. At the state level, the New York state legislature has not passed A1115/S309 which would ban ES&S machines that can print on ballots after they are cast, changing or invalidating a vote, and counting bar codes that voters can’t read. If they don’t act in the next week or so, those unauditable machines will be coming to New York City.
Allegra Dengler

Advocates and state lawmakers are calling for a ban on the use of "all-in-one" voting machines that use a printer and ballot scanner in the same device.

Supporters of ending the use of those machines argue they lack sufficient cyber security standards and are too costly.

"Lawmakers must act quickly and pass legislation that bans One-in-All voting machines for good," said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause/NY. "They are wasteful, insecure and deeply flawed machines. Our current system is already the current gold standard: voter-marked paper ballots and optical scanners. Any one-in-all voting machine would be a serious –and expensive – needless step backwards. Protect the voters and secure the right to vote."

“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.”