Appeals court turns away GOP challenge to NY absentee ballot laws

A state appeals court reversed a Republican-led challenge to New York’s absentee-voting laws, declining the party’s attempt to invalidate perhaps hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots.

The Appellate Division, Third Department, on Tuesday unanimously upheld a law allowing anyone to vote absentee if they’re afraid of catching or spreading an infectious disease, such as COVID-19. The law is set to remain in place through 2022.

New York appeals absentee ballot rule with election looming

New York officials appealed a judge’s ruling against inspecting absentee ballots before Election Day, allowing early counting of those ballots to go ahead pending an appeals court decision.

A state judge in upstate New York on Friday said the pandemic-related rule that allowed absentee ballots to be prepared for counting before Election Day was unconstitutional. Saratoga County Judge Diane Freestone sided with Republican and Conservative party plaintiffs in ruling that the law clashes with an individual’s constitutional right to challenge ballots in court before they’re counted.

Election Day Is Nov. 8, But Legal Challenges Already Begin

AP: "The RNC said it has a multimillion-dollar “election integrity” team. It has hired 37 lawyers in key states, held more than 5,000 training sessions to teach volunteers to look for voter fraud — which is rare and isolated — and filed 73 suits in 20 states. Other Trump-allied legal teams, including America First Legal, run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, are involved."

Supreme Court justice rules part of N.Y. absentee voting law is unconstitutional

A state Supreme Court justice issued a split ruling Friday that found New York's absentee ballot laws are partially unconstitutional, a decision that will hurl an element of disorder into the midterm election in which mail-in voting is already underway.

State Supreme Court Justice Dianne L. Freestone's decision stopped short of overturning a change in Election Law that allows someone to vote by absentee ballot if they fear contracting COVID-19, a measure that she highly criticized but said could not be undone at this time.

Right-Wing Leaders Mobilize Corps of Election Activists

Officials are prepared for aggressive challenges in midterm elections. “We’re going to adjudicate every battle,” Stephen K. Bannon said. ..."Their tactics in primary elections have officials braced for a range of new challenges, including disruptive poll watchers and workers, aggressive litigation strategies, voter and ballot challenges and vigilante searches for fraud.”

The Real Threat to American Democracy

For the past two years, Americans have been overwhelmed by a deluge of headlines suggesting democracy in the United States is under threat: Voter suppression. A shortage of drop boxes. Election deniers seeking key state offices. It can be difficult to gauge what stories suggest a truly terrifying threat to democracy, and which are simply disheartening or even petty. The Opinion Video film above aims to unpack one of the most dire threats to democracy, which includes a sophisticated plot to control not only who can vote, but which votes get counted.

Activists Flood Election Offices With Challenges

NYTimes: "The new tactic of flooding offices with challenges...weaponizes the process. Sorting through the piles of petitions is costly and time-consuming, increasing the chances that overburdened election officials could make mistakes that could disenfranchise voters. And while election officials say they’re confident in their procedures, they worry about the toll on trust in elections. The challenge process, as used by election deniers, has become another platform for spreading doubt about the security of elections.”

Tory leadership contest's online vote is still vulnerable to hackers

"…first time the UK prime minister will be chosen using online votes, and continued worries over hacking raise questions about whether online voting is a safe or wise choice when the stakes are so high….many nations run their own cyberattack teams .....Public distrust in electronic voting could further undermine faith in politics….

"Douglas Jones..says that making a vote public rather than secret is one way to guarantee safety, and that if people want to keep information on who voted for whom secret, then computers aren’t the way to go…. “I cannot see how to guarantee ballot secrecy without some form of physical ballot voted in the privacy of a voting booth.””

Conspiracy Theorists Want to Run America’s Elections. These Are the Candidates Standing in Their Way

TIME “There is a loose brigade of unassuming civil servants on the front lines of the fight to protect America’s election system from the Trump allies out to disrupt it, writes @charlottealter.
They have little in common except a collective purpose: each of them ran this year for an election-oversight position against an opponent who embraces Trump’s “Big Lie.”

A Dominion voting machine ended up on eBay. Here's how much it sold for

Authorities in Michigan are investigating how a missing voting machine from the state wound up for sale on eBay last month for $1,200.

The machine was purchased by a cybersecurity expert in Connecticut who alerted Michigan authorities and is now waiting for law enforcement to pick up the device. CNN determined the machine was dropped off at a Goodwill store in Northern Michigan, before being sold last month on eBay by a man in Ohio.

NYS Board of Elections urged not to certify the ES&S ExpressVote XL due to noncompliance with NYS law

Below is a letter that is in the mail to the New York State Board of Elections.

In it, Citizens for Voting Integrity and others ask the Board of Elections not to certify the ES&S ExpressVote XL as it does not comply with current NYS law.

The Board of Elections must deny certification of a voting machine that would move New York backwards from our current verifiable system of hand-marked paper ballots. Any new or replacement voting machine or system must preserve all the rights and privileges thus far granted by law to New York's voters.

Rensselaer County's Republican elections commissioner arrested by FBI

"The actions of Schofield, 42, surfaced in the federal criminal case involving former Troy Councilwoman Kimberly Ashe-McPherson….she pleaded guilty June 8 to a felony charge in U.S. District Court after admitting she had fraudulently submitted absentee ballots in last year's primary and general elections. ...Schofield was the unidentified board of elections official listed as "Individual-3." According to the document, Schofield had allegedly facilitated helping Ashe-McPherson obtain an absentee ballot through an online portal using the name and date of birth of a voter without "lawful authority.”

‘The US could lose the right to vote within months’: Top official warns on threat to democracy

.. a near-daily torrent of threats, many violent and eerily “descriptive”. “Jena Griswold: "It is really hard to do your job when someone’s telling you over and over how they’re going to hang you" ..earlier this year, Tina Peters, a far-right county clerk in Colorado, was indicted on charges that she directed a breach of voting machines. The episode spurred Griswold to raise the alarm about “insider threats”.”

Suspect petitions were assembled at NY Republican headquarters

""It is clear the Zeldin campaign perpetrated a fraud," Myrie alleged. "Pages of valid signatures were photocopied. Thereafter, the original sheets were paginated, as were the photocopied pages. These sheets were assigned different page numbers in order to create the appearance that the pages contained separate, valid signatures. ... What is unknown and must be investigated by your office is who committed these criminal acts.””

Barcode Voting Machines: The Most Unnecessary Gap in US Election Security

"“Voters can’t read barcodes,” said Alex Halderman, professor of computer science and director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan. “The problem is that you’re putting a potentially compromised computer in between the voter and the permanent and only record of their ballot.”...“ Will Adler, a senior technologist in election and democracy at the Center for Democracy and Technology,"All of those concerns about someone manipulating the software — to change the election or to even just create chaos and distrust — apply equally, or even more, to people who have had insider access,” he said. “

...At a time in which mistrust in elections has been stoked, the opaqueness of BMDs poses a problem even if the vote counting goes entirely by the book. ...“People who want to delegitimize the results of elections will go to the ballot marking devices and risks and point out that we don’t have a good way to know whether we had a malfunction or not,”

COMMENT: Since the NY Assembly failed to pass a bill banning them, the New York State Board of Elections is in the process of certifying the ES&S Expressvote XL, a voting machine like those raising alarms in this article. If this bothers you, contact the New York State Board of Elections and tell them to deny certification to ES&S Expressvote XL, since voting machines with barcodes violate your right to verify your vote before it is cast. They must not certify this voting machine. Allegra Dengler