Update:  Since this article was published, we were very appreciative that the NYS Senate passed the Hybrid Voting Machine ban (S309B) but unfortunately  the heavily lobbied Assembly did not vote it out of committee.  So we are again working for legislation to protect our hand marked paper ballots as well as to have them recounted by hand in close vote margin elections and audits.  Instead of progress to protect our existing system based on hand marked paper ballots, a new bill has been introduced to make things even worse.  Let your NY state elected official know that you oppose S1014/A1259.  which would allow audits to also  be counted by machine instead of by hand.  

The controversial ESS Expressvote XL has not been certified, yet. The Dominion ICX is in the process of certification.  The ICX has a version that would protect the hand-marked paper ballot but another version does not.

"The misstep, where fail-safe measures failed, caused some votes to be double-counted and appears to change the outcome of a race for Ocean Township school board, where Steve Clayton’s 20-vote victory now looks like a 1-vote win for the incumbent, Jeffrey Weinstein.."

NYTimes: Flaw Exposed by Jan. 6 "“It has been lying there like unexploded ordinance since 1887,” said Bob Bauer, an election law specialist “

A very close race in Onondaga County led to a hand count that did not change the winner but changed the final vote slightly, with some votes disqualified.  "The removed votes came primarily from voters who either identified themselves (placing their initials on the ballot, for example) or made such small marks inside the oval that it wasn’t clear they even meant to cast a vote (so-called “hesitation marks.”)” "All told, that resulted in in Mannion losing 18 votes and Shiroff losing 11 votes from the recount figures.”

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.”

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.