COMMENT: Clear Ballot profiled here is certified in New York and is in use in Onondaga County.  It uses a paper trail based on hand-marked paper ballots, which is the gold standard for elections .".Voters feed their hand-marked ballots into the scanner, which is the size of a cash register and has a thick screen on top. It tabulates blackened ovals and captures a digital image of the entire slip for backup, then spits the ballot down into a bolted cabinet so it can be audited by hand if needed"

Unfortunately, the NYS Board of Elections also certified the ES&S Expressvote XL that is similar to the controversial machines used in Georgia in that it counts the barcode.  In Georgia, "Dominion’s ImageCast X lets voters tap choices on a touchscreen, then prints their selections on a summary receipt in plain text with a corresponding QR code. Voters deposit the receipt into a separate Dominion tabulator, which scans the code and tallies the vote. ..But anxieties over whether the QR data matches what people actually selected have led to a huge push to revert to pens and Sharpies”.  

The  ES&S ExpressVote BMD Terminal  used in Kentucky is a BMD (ballot marking device). “The easiest way to think about it is that the touchscreens are just an expensive ink pen,” Taylor Brown”.  It’s reassuring that Kentucky is using this system and not the ES&S Expressvote XL that  New York State Board of Elections certified last year.

Officials have been bracing for problems for months. In May, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned the 2024 election likely will be the most attacked by malicious foreign forces in American history. Now, some of those concerns have played out in headlines about multiple fake videos linked to a Russian disinformation campaign, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

"On Election Day, Civil Rights Division personnel will be available all day to receive questions and complaints from the public related to possible violations of federal voting rights laws. Reports may be made through the department’s website www.civilrights.justice.gov or by calling toll-free at 800-253-3931.”

The conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen is now mainstream on the right. Believers are undeterred by the fact that the election was free and fair and the lack of evidence of fraud. Those who seek to correct the misinformation become targets of Donald Trump and his allies.

After former President Donald Trump lost in 2020, he has refused to accept the outcome, falsely casting the results as fraud and the election as stolen. This message has been amplified by conspiracy theorists who have peddled claims that the use of machines to count ballots allows results to be rigged. Election workers have been intimidated and threatened.

When Melissa Kono, the town clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin, began training election workers in 2015, their questions were relatively mundane. They asked about election rules, voter eligibility, and other basic procedures. The job was gratifying and enjoyable; they helped their neighbors while sipping coffee.

But over the past few years, everything has changed. Kono now finds herself fielding questions about what to do when approached by suspicious voters who ask provocative questions or gripe about fraud. She’s added an entire training section dedicated to identifying threats and how to report them. 

Federal authorities believe a viral video spreading online showing mail ballots being destroyed in the key battleground suburb of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, might be a hoax perpetrated by Russia as part of its covert effort to help elect former President Donald Trump, a federal official exclusively told USA TODAY on Friday.

The state’s highest court has a chance to shore up election law meant to guard against fraud.
By Times Union Editorial Board, Opinion

The current battle — over who has control on local elections boards to validate or negate an absentee ballot — is ultimately about the integrity of the bipartisan system that has long been entrusted to run elections as fairly as possible. We look the state’s highest court to make the right choice – that is, to reject an earlier appellate ruling and safeguard the admittedly imperfect system we have.

The question at the heart of the case isn’t complicated: What happens when elections officials can’t agree on whether a signature on absentee ballot documents is legitimate?

A Georgia judge has declared that seven new election rules recently passed by the state election board are “illegal, unconstitutional and void”.

Fulton county superior court judge Thomas Cox issued the order Wednesday after holding a hearing on challenges to the rules. The rules that Cox invalidated include three that had gotten a lot of attention – one that requires that the number of ballots be hand-counted after the close of polls and two that had to do with the certification of election results.

Here’s Greg Palast’s take on the threat covered in the Washington Post article.

“... there is, frighteningly, a way to overturn the election, but January 6 is too late.  The day that should give any lover of democracy the shivers is December 11.  That’s the date designated by the Constitution as the Certificate of Ascertainment deadline."

If the right strews constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two people will have cleared the path. Two men recognized and exploited the anti-democratic loopholes within America’s rickety democracy in order to deliver Republicans victories that they could never win at the ballot box.

Things haven’t changed much since the Lessig book came out in February.  This time the Democrats are lawyering up early to combat some of these threats but it will also take a lot of citizen action to protect this election. Read the transcript of an interview with Lessig last April.

While several other states have moved to speed up the vote count in the four years since 2020’s post-election chaos, political gridlock in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin has prevented a change that could have paved the way for earlier projections: the ability to begin opening and processing mail-in ballots before Election Day.

Donald Trump and election denialist allies at Turning Point USA, True the Vote and other Maga stalwarts are spreading conspiracy theories about election fraud in order to lay the groundwork for charging the election was rigged if Trump loses, warn election experts and some veteran Republicans.

From Georgia to Arizona, Nevada to Michigan, Republicans are mounting an all-out assault on the election process that journalist Ari Berman refers to as a “five-alarm fire for democracy.”

We all have a role to play in protecting our democracy this year – and that’s why I’m excited to invite you to two upcoming Common Cause webinars to empower you with the knowledge and tools to make a difference.

"Marks tells me that many of the organizations and media outlets misreporting the rule and state law "are from out of state. They are assuming that Georgia is like a normal state, and that Georgia actually has good elections, that numbers reconcile, that ballots are counted well. The problem is that Georgia does not have a reasonable system for counting ballots." She argues that Dems may want to be careful about what they wish for when fighting against "reasonable inquiry" regarding results this year…."What these rules actually do is help the Democrats," Marks argues. "Because they are going to need to do everything possible to protect --- if Harris wins, and you know it's going to be close --- if Harris wins, they'll have to do everything possible to protect that win. And without some of these transparency measures, they would have a hell of a fight.””

A voting law that Republicans claim could lead to rampant voter fraud in New York is now in the hands of a state appellate court, which will decide if it should remain on the books or be struck down as unconstitutional.

At issue is one sentence in state Election Law that was added in 2021 when Democrats changed how absentee ballots are counted.

Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Donald Trump supporters are implementing a strategy of embedding themselves in the administrative side of the election so they can subvert the certification of the election if the outcome is not in Trump's favor.