In a letter to federal investigators, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and Special Counsel Jack Smith, Free Speech For People called for a “vigorous and swift investigation” into the Trump attorneys’ plan, claiming possible evidence of federal crimes.

Arizona VoteBeat: “Democracy prevailed, but it’s not out of the woods.” she said. Hobbs’ gubernatorial challenger Kari Lake has refused to concede and has said she plans to file a lawsuit challenging the results. Shortly after the certification ceremony Monday, Lake shared a video on Twitter of her during an interview with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon in which she called it a “sham election” and apparently referring to  Maricopa County’s printer problems.

Arizona VoteBeat: "The stakes are high for counties that rely on all parts of an electronic voting system to work perfectly in front of the voters’ eyes, from the time the voter checks in to the time the ballot is tabulated...Much can go wrong in the sensitive system. Electronic poll books with voter registration information can have connectivity problems. The power supply itself can be too weak for the printer to function properly. Humidity can alter the paper quality ahead of time. Tabulators can be programmed incorrectly, causing wide-scale ballot rejection…. And printers are known for their IT headaches.”

…. an early morning of worry, as the U.S. Supreme Court heard Moore v. Harper. We have long warned of the dangers of this case for American elections as we know them. The dispute comes from a challenge filed by North Carolina Republicans after the state's Supreme Court nixed partisan U.S. House maps gerrymandered by the state's GOP legislature. The state court ordered new, fair maps to be drawn instead for 2022, when Republicans and Democrats would evenly split the state's 14 House Districts, winning seven seats each in the closely divided state.

Every Sunday I share with you a chapter or two from one of my books. This is a serialization of the entire book, done a chapter or two every Sunday for the next few months, of The Hidden History of the War on Voting.

AP "Knisley worked to get a security badge for a man..who then used it to allow another, unauthorized person inside the room to make a copy of the election equipment hard drive during the May 2021 election equipment update…..State election officials became aware of the security breach when a photo and video of confidential voting system passwords were posted on social media and a conservative website.”

Bradblog: "When you think about marking a ballot by a pen and then watch the process on a machine, it seems amazing that somebody would spend $3,000 on a machine to do what a $1 pen would do. But here we are.”

A recount will decide a central New York state Senate race in which the candidates are separated by 27 votes. 

Democratic state Sen. John Mannion leads Republican challenger Rebecca Shiroff by a narrow margin in the 50th Senate District, which includes parts of Onondaga and Oswego counties. 

Common Cause: Sponsor a volunteer! Ahead of the runoff, we urgently need an infusion of resources to ramp up our nonpartisan Election Protection program. Our team has been working non-stop to defend EVERY voter’s rights — and I’m simply amazed at what we’ve been able to accomplish together so far.

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 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.

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."

We must rapidly scale up our volunteer training program to match this historic level of interest, sharing the lessons learned from the primaries this year while stepping up our recruitment efforts even further.

The result? With your help, we plan to field thousands more nonpartisan election protection volunteers at the highest-need polling places across the country.

Huffpo: “ Armed individuals dressed in tactical gear are surveilling ballot drop boxes in Arizona, raising concerns about intimidation during early voting in the midterm elections."
COMMENT: To help protect voters in New York or other states, volunteer with NYDLC or Common Cause. Links follow the article. Allegra Dengler

Arizona county approves plan to hand-count "The county will tabulate its results using tabulation machines, then conduct a 100% hand count audit of the county’s ballots, which would have to be completed before the results are canvassed.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

"…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.””

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.”