"Voter-marked paper ballots enable each voter to cast the votes he or she intends. They also allow election boards to perform manual recounts and audits to confirm final tallies….Several new voting systems on the market, however, require voters to use a touchscreen to enter their choices on a displayed image of the ballot. ...New Yorkers need to send emails and make telephone calls to urge swift passage of Voting Integrity and Verification Act of New York (VIVA NY), number A5934-A/S6169-A We should contact Speaker of the Assembly Carl Heastie at Speaker@nyassembly.gov or (718) 654-6539. We must also contact Latrice Walker, chair of the Assembly Committee on Election Law, at WalkerL@nyassembly.gov or (718) 342-1256, as well as Zellnor Myrie, chair of the Senate Elections Committee, at myrie@nysenate.gov or (718) 284-4700."

To support our right to vote on paper ballots in New York, call State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie today.

Time: "Immediately after the settlement was announced (Fox $787.5 million), Poulos says, Dominion experienced a spike in death threats. Keeping his workforce safe remains a company priority…. Poulos emphasizied that Americans do not have to trust Dominion blindly because of its commitment to transparency and its existing capability of producing paper ballots. But that defense may come too late."

NYTimes; "The Trump allies who traveled to Coffee County copied elections software used across the state and uploaded it on the internet, creating the potential for future election manipulation, according to David Cross, a lawyer involved in civil litigation over election security in Georgia filed by the Coalition for Good Governance.”

SUMMARY: "Maybe now Jack Smith will start investigating the multi-state criminal plot by MAGA conspiracists to breach voting system software? Now that we know the unlawful scheme actually began in Donald Trump's Oval Office, as overseen by Trump himself, back in December of 2020? [Audio link to full show follows below.]"

SUMMARY: CNN  "On January 7, 2021..., two people walked into an elections office in Coffee County, Georgia...A local election official helped them gain access to sensitive voting data which they downloaded onto a portable hard drive.    ...That data was then uploaded to an encrypted server and shared with several Trump allies and operatives....In a December 2022 letter to the FBI, Susan Greenhalgh,…of Free Speech For People, described how copies of the voting data from Coffee County have been “shared covertly with an unknown number of election deniers.” The letter warned that the data “could be used to sow distrust in elections, fabricate evidence to challenge legitimate election results, or even to manipulate election results in the future.”...Greenhalgh ... has asked the FBI and Smith’s team to investigate the Coffee County breach as recently as this week…

Ruling: "The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” (emphasis in original)"

Why hasn't the FBI begun a probe of the multi-state effort, headed up by Trump's then-attorney Sidney Powell, to unlawfully and surreptitiously make copies of voting and tabulation system software in at least four states after the 2020 election? We now know that this happened in Coffee County, Georgia, Mesa County, Colorado, several townships in Michigan, and at least one county in Pennsylvania. We also have evidence that the conspirators planned to breach the election system in Nevada as well.

As news trickled out that former President Trump’s supporters had organized to access federally protected election machines and copied sensitive information and software, election expert Susan Greenhalgh waited for FBI or Justice Department leaders to announce an investigation.

From Heather Cox Richardson:

President Joe Biden spoke this afternoon in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when law enforcement officers tried to beat into silence Black Americans marching for their right to have a say in the government under which they lived. Standing at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which had been named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, Biden said: “On this bridge, blood was given to help ‘redeem the soul of America.’”

The story of March 7, 1965, commemorated today in Selma, is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed. It is also a story of how hard local authorities, entrenched in power and backed by angry white voters, worked to make the hurdles of that process insurmountable.

". Fox lied about election fraud and should be held accountable for that, and Dominion and other voting system vendors have repeatedly failed in American elections. ...By way of fresh evidence to support that charge, we close with details on voting system failures in both New Jersey and California in November of 2022…"

Top state election and cybersecurity officials on Thursday warned about threats posed by Russia and other foreign adversaries ahead of the 2024 elections, noting that America's decentralized system of thousands of local voting jurisdictions creates a particular vulnerability.

Hosts at Fox News privately ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen while simultaneously peddling the same lies on air, according to court filings in a defamation lawsuit against the network.

There's a reason I always warn, when reporting election results on The BradCast, that they have only been tallied by computers to date, and that errors in results often do not come to light until days, weeks or even months after elections...if ever. ...there is no way to know for certain either way unless and until results of hand-marked paper ballots are examined by actual human beings

A friend of mine summarized this voting machine failure:
1. A computerized voting machine system failed to count votes accurately, and, until irregularities in an unrelated issue caused the Board of Elections to launch an internal investigation, nobody knew
2. It was not detected by a post-election audit
3. The discovered error in the voting system changed the result of the election, AFTER it had been certified by the local board and the wrong “winner” took office.  
4. The voting machine system in use was the ExpressVote XL – which happens to be a machine that I am trying to persuade people in New York not to certify for use and/or to legislatively prohibit.

Comment:   The ESS Expressvote voting machine involved in this miscount is currently under review  for certification in New York.  Last year the NYS Senate passed a bill to ban this type of voting machine but the Assembly did not vote it out of committee.  Let your Assembly member know that you want to protect your vote by mandating hand marked paper ballots that are hand counted in audits and close vote elections. 
Allegra Dengler

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.”