Votebeat

Trump move to neutralize election administration agency creates chilling effect, but its impact may be muted

2026-07-13T15:04:46+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump’s abrupt removal Thursday of the three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission leaves the agency unable to make key policy decisions, but is unlikely to disrupt preparations for the November elections, according to former staff members and election analysts.

Still, even though Trump’s move won’t bring the agency to a halt, it has created concerns that the president might take further steps to weaken the agency that distributes congressionally-apportioned election funding to states and certifies voting equipment.

The White House declined on Friday to give more detail on its reasons for dismissing the commissioners or explain what the president hoped to achieve by stripping the election oversight agency of its ability to enact changes to policy and voting system guidelines. But the move came at a time of rising concern over how the Trump administration could attempt to influence the outcome of November’s midterm elections.

Benjamin Hovland, one of the two Democratic commissioners fired by Trump, said it would be “challenging to operate without commissioners or a quorum.” Because the agency is small and lightly funded, commissioners play a much larger hands-on role than they do at many other federal agencies, he added. Still, he said, “There is a great team there and they’ll keep doing this work.”

Hovland was sitting at an airport waiting for a cancelled flight on Thursday when he got an unexpected two-sentence email from the White House letting him know he had been fired. Hovland said no one from the Trump administration had been in touch with him since they took control in 2025.

When the U.S. Supreme Court last month gave the president unprecedented new power to fire leaders of independent agencies, Hovland said he figured he would be dismissed “sooner rather than later.”

What the EAC can still do

Ryan Macias, an election technology expert who oversaw federal certification of voting systems at the EAC from 2016 to 2019, said the dismissals were likely to have little or no impact on the day-to-day business at the commission.

States are still expected to get federal election funding already in the pipeline for the November election, which is disbursed according to already-set formulas. While many states rely on the EAC’s federal certification of voting systems, the testing and certification of voting systems does not require action by the commissioners, meaning voting systems can continue to be tested, updated and certified to the standards commissioners had previously adopted, Macias said. Three commissioners would have to approve any updates or changes to the current guidelines.

Commissioners do play a role in some parts of the certification process, at least theoretically. If a voting system vendor disputes the outcome or process of a certification decision, commissioners would hear the appeal. But, Macias said, that’s never happened.

Trump’s actions could also renew debate in Congress over shutting down the EAC, which has been the target of repeated closure efforts, though those have quieted in recent years.

The EAC was created by Congress in response to the disputed, chaotic 2000 presidential election, whose outcome was ultimately decided by a Supreme Court ruling. The agency provides support to states by distributing federal election funds, maintaining the national mail voter registration form, testing and certifying voting systems, and offering best practices and guidance to state and local election officials.

The agency has a four-member commission split between Democrats and Republicans, and most major decisions require an affirmative vote from at least three. Commissioners are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Hovland’s nomination process took around 9 months, and was on the shorter side. Even if Trump moves quickly to nominate replacements, the agency appears unlikely to regain a quorum before the November election.

This is not the first time the EAC has operated without a quorum, though it is the first time it has been left with no commissioners at all. Between 2010 and 2015, the agency lacked enough commissioners to take official action after the Senate stopped confirming nominees — and some congressional leaders stopped recommending them — as lawmakers debated whether the agency should continue to exist. That prolonged vacancy delayed updates to the federal voting system guidelines and left the commission unable to take many policy actions.

Election officials see little immediate disruption

For election officials, the consensus is that the firings are unlikely to disrupt this year’s elections. But several said the longer-term implications are harder to forecast, particularly if the administration takes additional steps to reshape or weaken the agency.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat who is a member of the EAC Board of Advisors, called the agency a valuable partner since it was created in 2002.

“I do not expect the changes at the EAC to have any immediate impact on the administration of elections in Minnesota or across the country,” he said. “Yet, the loss of the entire EAC leadership is another canary in the coal mine – and I urge Americans to take notice.”

Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, said Trump’s moves might not have a major impact on the upcoming elections, but suggested that they should be seen in the broader context of Trump’s widespread efforts to eliminate government election integrity programs and cast doubt on elections where Democrats fare well.

“In the short term, it’s another chilling effect,” Blacksberg said. “I don’t think there’s going to be an end to or a deescalation to these actions as the election gets closer.”

Hovland, who served seven years on the commission, defended the agency’s work.

“We weren’t perfect, and we weren’t a silver bullet, but we were someone in the federal government that was still trying to help,” he said. “I am so proud of the team and the agency.” He added, “I feel like people lose sight of why Congress created the EAC.”

Jessica Huseman contributed reporting.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Political parties in Texas choose how to run their primaries. Here’s how that causes headaches for voters.

2026-04-29T14:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

By all accounts, the administration of the 2026 primary election in Williamson County was calamitous.

Voters did not know where to vote. Lines were long and chaotic. Election workers made errors and misplaced ballots.

Nearly everyone seems to agree on who’s to blame: the Williamson County Republican Party, which last fall decided to eliminate countywide voting and, for the first time in more than a decade, force all voters to cast ballots at assigned precincts instead. Republicans in Dallas and Eastland counties made the same decision.

The moves set off a chain reaction of problems.

“It was a mess, and I’m not going to deny that it was a mess,” said Michelle Evans, the chair of the Williamson County GOP, at a county commissioners court meeting days after the March election, though she said Republicans weren’t the only ones responsible. The meeting, inside the county courthouse in downtown Georgetown, an affluent suburb of Austin, was packed with upset voters and poll workers, who applauded a line of unhappy speakers.

“I think that the constituents of this county deserve free and fair elections. I’m actually just kind of upset. I can’t believe that I have to sit here and say these things,” one speaker said. “I think we all deserve better.”

Russ Boles, a Republican county commissioner, said neighbors and friends reached out on Election Day, frustrated and frantic because they couldn’t vote.

“I tried explaining to them that this was the parties’ election,” not a decision made by the county, he said during the meeting, still confounded.

“They don’t buy it.”

Believe it or not, it’s true. Texas is the rare state that still gives county political parties the authority to administer primary elections more or less as they please, with taxpayers paying for it. Although early voting is administered by county governments, on Election Day, the parties, under state law, are allowed to decide where voters cast ballots, how they cast them, and how those ballots are counted.

That means that when the executive committee of the Williamson County GOP decided to go back to precinct-based voting, county election officials who saw problems coming could and did warn them — but couldn’t stop them.

Party control of primaries has been the law in Texas for more than 100 years. But experts and officials say it’s caused more problems lately, including the ones that marred last month’s election. They point to changes demanded by some Republicans, influenced by unfounded conspiracies about election technology and practices. Some of those changes, they say, have made elections in some counties less secure, results less accurate, or conditions worse for voters. And those voters have few options to hold the parties accountable.

Residents walk out of Jaycee Zaragoza Recreation Center on primary Election Day in Dallas. During early voting, the site was a vote center where anyone in Dallas County could vote, regardless of address or party. But on Election Day, only voters assigned to that site could cast ballots there, and many people showed up only to learn that they would need to travel elsewhere to vote.

In Dallas County, where Republicans also forced a switch back to precincts, at least 12,674 confused voters went to the wrong precinct, creating chaos on Election Day. Dozens of voters in Eastland County were also confused by the switch to precincts, and some complained about the party’s decision to switch to hand-marked paper ballots. Meanwhile, hand-counting GOP primary results in Eastland took until deep into the day after the election, and Calhoun County Republicans missed a state-mandated deadline to report results.

Republicans’ decision to count primary results by hand and to eliminate all use of electronic election equipment in Gillespie County has led to errors, and at least two instances where the county’s elections administrator believes some people were permitted to vote twice. And within the past five years, county party officials from both major parties have been charged with misusing the money allocated to them by the state to pay for election costs.

Republicans, though, are pressing for even more power over Texas primaries. In late 2025, they sued the state’s top election official, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, seeking to close the primary and even to create their own voter registration system.

Lawmakers unlikely to intervene in party control

Party control of primaries is enshrined in state law, and only Texas lawmakers can change it. But it’s unlikely that they will. “I’d rather see the parties learn from their mistakes than have the state come in and take any decision-making away from them,” said State Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas who chairs the House elections committee.

State Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat and the vice chair of the committee, said he is planning legislation that would let each party make independent decisions about countywide voting, so one party can’t force the other into precinct voting against their will.

Taking primary election administration decisions away from the county parties “is a much harder hurdle,” Bucy said. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t have those conversations moving forward so that this doesn’t happen again, but in most counties, both parties work well together and get this done efficiently.”

The current system was created as a response to Jim Crow-era efforts to keep Black Texans from voting in wholly party-controlled primaries. Those efforts ultimately led to three U.S. Supreme Court decisions ruling that primaries are not private activities, but instead, public functions, and therefore, keeping Black voters from participating in them was unconstitutional.

After those rulings, party and county officials began to run the primaries together. For years, parties paid for the costs of the primary with funds from candidate filing fees. Years later, the state began allocating some public money, and by the 1990s, it was paying up to 60% of the costs, with the rest coming from filing fees. In the handful of other states where state law permits parties to run their own primaries, they rarely do it because the laws also require the parties to also pay the expenses if they do.

Danielle Diaz Clark, right, running for Judge of the 301st Family District Court, talks through the assigned precinct locations to electioneers and a voter that was turned away from Disciple Central Community Church in Dallas on March 3, 2026.

But in Texas, state law continues to describe primary elections as party-run elections, even as they are now mostly funded by the public. Under this system, lawmakers allocate funding and parties must follow state-mandated requirements, such as providing the required number of workers at polling locations and turning in results no later than 24 hours after polls close.

Outside of this, parties have wide leeway for how to run their elections. Parties can choose whether to run a joint primary with the opposing political party or not. They can also choose whether to contract with the county elections department to run the election, or some aspects of it, or run it entirely on their own.

In a state with 254 counties, that means that by law, on Election Day, the primary can be administered up to 508 different ways across the state.

For a long time, local officials were happy to let the parties take on the chore of running the primaries, particularly as it represented yet another task for county clerks until the 1980s, when a new law allowed counties to create election departments, said Glen Maxey, a former Democratic state lawmaker and lobbyist. These days, more counties have hired professional election administrators, but whether or not they handle administering the primary elections is still up to the parties to decide.

Maxey in the early 2000s helped craft legislation creating the state’s countywide polling place program, which allows voters to cast their ballot at any polling location in the county. The polling locations used under the program are also known as vote centers, and can reduce election costs and staffing needs while offering voters more flexibility in where they can cast ballots.

In order to use the countywide polling place program for the primary, both political parties have to agree, a compromise Maxey said was necessary for the legislation to pass. Otherwise, by law, both parties must use the assigned precinct locations on Election Day.

That’s why, when Republican parties this year in Dallas, Williamson, and Eastland counties rejected countywide polling places after years of using them, Democrats, too, were forced into assigned precincts, sparking mass voter confusion.

Still, “I don’t think there’s any way in hell” state lawmakers will change party control of primaries, Maxey said.

“It would take somebody at the top, the governor, or somebody asking for election reform, or it would take one of their races being affected by a hand count or something,” he said.

Republicans in all three counties have since said they’ll use countywide voting for the May 26 runoff election. But in Dallas County, the decision to switch back sparked a messy backlash that led to the resignation of the party chair and a lawsuit — which was dismissed by the courts — to try to avert the switch.

Ultimately, GOP party chairs said they believe Texas should keep the current system of party control, though some want a few tweaks.

Two election workers transfer early voting ballots from Eastland County Courthouse to the Judge Scott Bailey Event Center to be counted by hand on March 3, 2026.

Evans, the GOP chair in Williamson County, took responsibility for the problems there, but also told Votebeat that county election offices should have been more prepared to contend with any choice the county parties make, since they’re within their legal rights to make them.

The GOP chair in Gillespie, Bruce Campbell, also said he believes parties should keep control. But he wants the Legislature to require an audit for hand counts. Under current state law, only machine counts must be audited.

For their part, some Democratic leaders also say the parties should remain involved in their candidates’ nominations and in how primary elections are administered. But Kardal Coleman, the Democratic chair in Dallas County, said he’s open to improvements and learning from other states.

“Everything we do should be for the benefit of voters and to make the process more seamless and easier for them to participate in,” Coleman said.

Parties’ changes have risked election security

Republicans have repeatedly said their election administration choices are aimed at making elections more secure. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

In Gillespie County, home to Fredericksburg in the Texas Hill Country, where Republicans have now chosen to count ballots by hand in the past two primaries, county officials found that some voters cast ballots twice in 2024.

Jim Riley, the county elections administrator, had tried for months ahead of the 2024 primary election to convince Republicans that the county’s electronic voting equipment was secure.

But Republicans didn’t want to use it. And in addition to declining to use the tabulation equipment, the party asked Riley to assemble paper poll books, a substitute for the electronic poll books the county typically uses.

In June, not long after the 2024 runoff election, Riley was manually updating the voting history of voters who’d cast ballots in the election, as required by law.

He saw something that didn’t look right. He paused when he noticed that a voter on one of the lists had been marked as having voted in both the Democratic and Republican primaries on Election Day. Then, he found another one. He also spotted one who’d voted in the Democratic primary and subsequently cast a ballot in the Republican runoff, which is prohibited under state law.

“It should have all been caught,” Riley told Votebeat. But it wasn’t, because Republicans were not using electronic poll books — the equipment that election officials use to quickly check whether a voter has already voted or not. Instead, they were relying on the more cumbersome paper system.

Riley reported what he found to the county sheriff’s office and the county’s district attorney’s office. The sheriff’s office said its investigation is still ongoing.

This year, when Republicans changed longtime election practices in Williamson and Eastland counties, it led to misplacement of some ballots and tally sheets that are necessary to complete election results. In both instances, a court order was necessary to resolve the issue and finish reporting election results.

Public dollars, party choices

Texas taxpayers spend millions on the primaries. The Legislature in 2025 allocated about $21 million in funding for the 2026 primary, and the state expected an additional $5 million from candidate filing fees that would also go toward the costs.

As recently as a decade ago, the state reimbursed party chairs for primary expenses with very little oversight. In 2017, lawmakers approved a change in state law meant to prevent party chairs’ misuse of state funds intended for administering primary elections.

The state now has more oversight over the expenses parties get reimbursed for, such as ballot printing costs, election supplies, polling location rental fees, election worker pay. When the parties choose to contract with county election officials to administer the primary, the state pays the county and voting equipment vendors directly. If the parties choose to handle it themselves, the state pays the party directly. Both county officials and county party chairs are required to submit expense reports with receipts and invoices for state approval.

Still, in recent years, party officials have been accused of stealing thousands of dollars from their party’s primary accounts.

And even funds used for election activities can add up. Gillespie County Republicans’ choice to hand count ballots in 2024 meant that primary cost more than double the 2020 primary, according to public records obtained by Votebeat. That year on Election Day, county Republicans paid more than $40,000 for 355 workers who spent nearly 24 hours hand counting. In the 2020 primary, when the party used the county’s voting equipment to tabulate results, the party employed 45 workers and spent less than $7,000.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office last year warned party officials multiple times that it wouldn’t cover higher-than-normal costs for the 2026 primary compared with previous years.

Campaign greeters look up as birds fly over the voting center at Oak Lawn Brach Library on primary Election Day in Dallas on March 3, 2026.

Frustrations, but no veto power

At that March meeting in Williamson County, poll worker after poll worker said they were embarrassed and frustrated on Election Day as voters from both parties showed up at the wrong polling location and had to be turned away. Some are now worried that the problems will affect upcoming elections in the county.

“I know how difficult it is to recruit poll workers, and this chaos just made future elections that much more difficult to staff,” one told commissioners at the meeting.

Another demanded answers from county leaders, “Why was the option given to the parties for single-precinct voting? Could the commissioners have stopped it or vetoed it?”

The answer is no.

Michelle Evans, Williamson County Republican Party Chair addresses the county commissioners court during a meeting on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, inside the county courthouse about the March 3 primary election.

Shaheen, the chair for the House Elections Committee, said he doesn’t want the state to step in, though he told Votebeat he expects the push by some local GOP parties to eliminate countywide voting and to get rid of voting machines to count ballots by hand won’t last much longer.

Some of those county parties, he said, “are experiencing the pain of some of their decisions and they’re going to learn their lessons.”

“What we need to do is do a better job of explaining to people that our elections in Texas are secure,” he said. “If this is because people are concerned about election integrity, then we need to do a better job at addressing that.”

The Dallas Free Press contributed photos to this article. Visit their site here.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Michigan Gov. Whitmer proposes $43 million for new election equipment

2026-02-11T23:33:57+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s proposed 2027-2028 budget includes more than $43 million for new voting equipment, an appropriation election officials across Michigan say is critical in keeping the state’s election infrastructure secure and up to date.

The money is only a tiny portion of the $88.1 billion proposal Whitmer unveiled Wednesday. If approved, it will allow clerks to upgrade their machinery to the newest federal standards without forcing cities and townships to shoulder all the costs on their own.

If that money doesn’t win approval from the Legislature, however, it could put a major crunch on local clerks who have already seen their elections budgets double or even triple in the last decade with recent expansions to voting procedures.

All three of Michigan’s contracts with the major voting companies that service election equipment across the state are set to expire at the end of February 2027, meaning clerks will upgrade to machines that meet new state certifications. The latest equipment, designed to meet new federal voting standards, can often cost at least $15,000 per precinct for tabulators and voter assist terminals, said Michael Siegrist, first vice president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks and the Canton Township clerk.

Up until now, much of the expense for new voting equipment has been covered by a combination of state money and federal funds from the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Clerks will sometimes buy upgraded equipment out of their elections budget, Siegrist said, but these “refreshes” are typically covered by federal and state dollars. That money greatly lessened clerks’ financial burden in 2007 and 2017, but the bulk of that money is now spent.

“If the state’s like, ‘You’ve got to get new equipment,’ it’s an unfunded mandate, and most of our local jurisdictions can’t really afford that,” Siegrist told Votebeat. “Some people can, some people can’t. We’re really pushing to avoid a two-tiered election system, where there are some [jurisdictions] on brand new, good equipment and some on bad equipment.”

That’s why clerks and election officials — including former Michigan Director of Elections Chris Thomas, who now works on contract with the city of Detroit — pushed hard to ensure there was money from the state in the budget proposal. Including the money in the 2027 fiscal year budget “allows sufficient time for procurement, testing, training and implementation ahead of future election cycles,” the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks said in a news release Wednesday.

The state funding would also result in more secure and reliable machines, Thomas told Votebeat. The new systems will meet the 2.0 version of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines adopted by the U.S. Election Administration Commission in 2021. Those guidelines have higher standards for security and durability, Thomas said.

“It’s not just a replacement of what we’ve got now,” Thomas said. “It’s actually taking a large step up to a better voting system, and that will ensure higher security across the board for every jurisdiction and every voter.”

Election security has become a key talking point among the state’s Democratic leaders in recent days after President Donald Trump suggested nationalizing elections and named Detroit as part of that conversation. In response, Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson have both emphasized that Michigan runs its elections safely and independently. Michigan has one of the most decentralized systems in the U.S., as local clerks take on the bulk of the elections work, unlike a majority of other states where elections are administered at the county level.

It’s likely that the budget, including elections funding, will be closely scrutinized by Republicans in the Legislature, whose support will be required to pass it. (While Democrats control the state Senate, Republicans control the state House.) Budget tensions nearly shut down the state’s government last fall.

Rep. Ann Bollin, a Republican from Brighton Township and the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told Votebeat on Wednesday that she wasn’t sure that $43 million was “the right number” but added that she expected Republicans “want to make sure that we’re running fair, free, and secure elections.”

Bollin is a former local clerk herself and said she supports state funding for new election equipment but isn’t sure the timeline is appropriate.

“We are going to have a change in secretary of state” after the 2026 election, she said. “That makes me pause. But putting in money and start saving for a reserve fund, I am supportive.”

Whitmer’s proposal is just the first step in the state’s budget process. The Legislature is required to pass a budget by July 1 each year. The new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

New federal ruling is latest defeat to Trump administration’s election agenda

2026-01-13T20:10:57+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A federal judge on Friday became the third one to block key provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at revising election rules nationwide, ruling that the Constitution gives states and Congress —not the president— the authority to exercise power over elections.

The administration signaled it is likely to appeal the decision, the latest blow to Trump’s agenda on elections.

His March executive order sought to require proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form, mostly ban the use of machine-readable codes when tallying ballots, and prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked Election Day but received afterwards.

The administration has appealed two earlier rulings in other cases against the executive order. The cases could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but election law experts told Votebeat the president faces long odds.

The White House has said the president is planning a second executive order on elections, though it’s unclear what will be in it, and federal court rulings so far show the approach has limitations.

“The court is very clear that the Constitution gives no authority to the president to do any of these things, and that federal law doesn’t either,” said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

The president has also pushed for congressional action to change federal election laws, though federal legislation so far has stalled. He’s called on state lawmakers to advance his policy goals and some states, including Ohio, have repealed grace periods for mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but not received until afterwards.

In rulings in the two related elections executive order cases last year, federal judges struck down provisions of the order requiring those who registered to vote using the federal voter registration form to provide documentary proof of citizenship and requiring federal voter registration agencies to “assess” the citizenship of individuals who receive public assistance before providing them a voter registration form.

“It keeps getting worse for him,” David Becker, an election lawyer who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and now leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, said about Trump. “The more courts look at this executive order, the more they come to the conclusion that the president vastly exceeded his constitutional authority.”

Court ruling meant to ‘restore the proper balance of power’

In his Friday ruling, U.S. District Judge John Chun sided with the states of Oregon and Washington in his ruling against provisions of Trump’s order. He ruled against aspects of the order that require documented proof of citizenship on a federal voter form, call on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to revise certification guidelines to prohibit certain voting machines, and stop absentee ballots arriving after Election Day from being tallied, even if they are postmarked by Election Day.

He also struck down provisions of the executive order tying federal election funding to complying with the proof-of-citizenship provisions and the one banning ballots arriving after Election Day from being processed.

Chun, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, cited a long history of federal authorities — courts, politicians, and the Founding Fathers — recognizing the potential dangers in giving the president unilateral presidential powers of elections.

The intent of his decision, he said, was to “restore the proper balance of power among the Executive Branch, the states, and Congress envisioned by the Framers.”

Chun specified that his rulings blocking provisions denying election funding and banning ballots arriving after Election Day would apply only to Oregon and Washington, states that primarily rely on mail voting and which brought the lawsuit. But he barred the U.S. EAC from altering the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship and altering the agency’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines to exclude machines that tally ballots using barcodes or quick-response codes.

The Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Executive order fails in court but inspires some action elsewhere

There are just two available constitutional paths for people in the federal government to change election policy in the states, Becker said: an act of Congress or persuading a state Legislature to change state election law.

Outside of some Republican-majority states banning mail-voting grace periods, he added, Trump’s desire to change state-level voting policy has been largely ineffective — states have hardly changed their practices.

Clinger said that the executive order is having a more tangible impact within the federal government.

For example, he said, the order instructed the U.S. Department of Justice to prioritize violations of election laws. The agency has filed 23 lawsuits so far against states unwilling to provide unredacted voter data to the government, which the Justice Department said it needs to make sure federal election laws are properly followed, and many of those lawsuits cited Trump’s executive order.

“Even if the executive order isn’t accomplishing its goals, it does come off as marching orders to the rest of the federal government to pursue related goals,” he said.

Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University who advised President Joe Biden’s administration on democracy and voting rights, said Trump’s election agenda boils down to “project power that he doesn’t have,” in hopes that the public will lose confidence in election results “even if the rules don’t change one bit.”

Levitt said doesn’t think the public will buy the hype, mostly because Trump and his allies don’t appear to have an actual plan for advancing their agenda. As he has in the past, he likened it to a South Park episode in which gnomes steal underpants as part of a three-step scheme — except they can’t explain the step between collecting the underpants and turning a profit.

A strategy missing the middle, Levitt said, “encapsulates quite a bit of the Trump administration’s approach to elections.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Congress hears pleas for more election funding. Will it respond?

2025-10-06T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

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On the eve of a government shutdown Tuesday, dozens of local election officials from around the country wandered the labyrinth of office buildings adjacent to the U.S. Capitol, lobbying members of Congress for more federal funding of elections.

In some ways, the local election officials were among the only people in the Capitol complex who didn’t really have to worry about the pending shutdown: The $15 million in election security grants that Congress appropriated for the states this year has already been doled out. But that amount helps explain why they were on Capitol Hill.

States and local jurisdictions are primarily responsible for running elections, and bear most of the costs. But elections have become increasingly complex and expensive, because of changes to state laws and cybersecurity concerns, and they’re under unprecedented scrutiny, from ordinary voters right up to the president.

Congressional funding for elections — generally in the form of grants awarded to states by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission under the Help America Vote Act — has fluctuated over the years. In recent years, it’s been very little, falling short of what experts and election administrators say is needed.

The local election officials, through a lobbying effort coordinated by the Project for Election Infrastructure, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on advocating for funding for state and local election administration, have been urging Congress to appropriate $400 million for election security in fiscal year 2026.

On Tuesday, that meant making the rounds on Capitol Hill, meeting mostly with congressional staff for members from their home states. The Maryland delegation ran into Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Democrat, in the elevator, scoring a chance to talk to him directly.

“They are all acknowledging the need,” said Brian Sleeth, the director of elections in Warren County, Ohio, after a morning of meetings on the House side. Tonya Wichman, director of elections in Defiance County, Ohio, said part of the goal is making sure members understand what election officials do and what they need in order to do it. “The standards are set so high,” she said.

In the afternoon, the Ohio delegation met with representatives of the state’s two Republican senators, including a hallway talk with a staff member for Sen. Jon Husted, a former secretary of state. The group had a longer meeting with Amanda Gould, the chief counsel in the office of Sen. Bernie Moreno and a former state elections director.

The prospects for federal funding are always uncertain, and this year, given the brinksmanship over even keeping the government open, that seems even more so than usual. But this particular group said everyone they met with seemed attentive. “As long as people are willing to listen to us,” said Shari Huff, the deputy director of elections in Warren County.

This is not the first time the need for more federal funding for elections has come up. The Bipartisan Policy Center pushed for Congress to allocate, yes, $400 million in fiscal year 2024, characterizing federal investment in elections as “irregular, unpredictable, and insufficient.” That year, Congress allocated $55 million, which amounted to about $1 million for each state and $200,000 for territories.

The House put $15 million in election infrastructure funding in an appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026, but it remains to be seen what Congress will eventually do — and, with the federal government shut down, when.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin to consider more electronic pollbook options, as in-house system faces limitations

2025-06-27T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

When Madison residents went to vote in a special election this month, they didn’t have to stand in line according to their last name or wait for poll workers to flip through paper lists to find their names. For the first time, election officials there used electronic pollbooks to check voters in, allowing them to search for voters’ names and collect signatures on digital pads.

They could also use the e-pollbooks to process absentee ballots, register new voters, and issue voter numbers, just as they did with paper poll books, but with less chance of error.

The pilot program in the state capital offered a glimpse of both the technology’s potential — and its current limitations. Poll workers praised the state’s in-house e-pollbook system, known as Badger Book, for its speed and accuracy. But its high costs, limited vendor options, and a lack of state funding for support staff have stalled broader adoption, especially in large cities.

Now, with the Wisconsin Elections Commission beginning to evaluate commercial e-pollbook vendors, clerks are hoping new options might offer a more sustainable path forward.

Deploying the state’s system in a city as large as Madison is “just not practical at this point,” Mike Haas, Madison’s interim clerk, said after the June 17 county supervisor election. “We looked at it more as an opportunity to get familiar with the technology.”

Funding is just one challenge. Adopting the e-pollbook in a city like Madison could cost well over $1 million. While the software is free, the hardware for running it — including a tablet-like device and a printer — costs well over $2,000 for each station, and each of the city’s 120 polling locations would each likely need several. Milwaukee, with over 180 sites, would face even higher costs. And in small, cash-strapped towns, setting aside even $10,000 for e-pollbooks can be unrealistic.

Another challenge is access to support. Badger Book is the only approved e-pollbook in the state, and it’s designed and maintained by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

While any municipality can use it, commission staffers would likely be limited in their ability to provide Election Day support for a city as big as Madison or Milwaukee, unless they got more funding from the Legislature.

Larger jurisdictions using Badger Book would have to manage some of the logistics and troubleshooting on their own, said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic appointee and current chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

“I would love it if we could have the staff sufficient to have a little Badger Book division and be able to service Badger Books statewide,” she said. “That would be terrific. That’s not our current reality.”

Sun Prairie confronts the costs of an upgrade

Sun Prairie, northeast of Madison, was the first municipality in Wisconsin to adopt the e-pollbook after the technology rolled out in 2018. Now around 400 out of the state’s 1,850 municipalities use it. It’s an excellent tool that saves hours of staff time, said Sun Prairie Clerk Elena Hilby, but the city’s hardware is aging and beginning to slow down, and as long as Badger Book is the only system available, she worries about the cost of updating it.

Currently, only one company in Wisconsin — PDS, A Converge Company, which is based in Oconomowoc — is authorized to replace the hardware used to operate the e-pollbooks.

When Hilby asked the company for a quote on a machine in January, the cost was $2,011, she said. In April, she said, it was $2,441, an increase that the company attributed to tariffs.

“We are literally fish in a barrel,” Hilby said. “They can make it cost whatever they want, and we’re stuck, because they’re the only ones we can use.”

And she doesn’t want the Badger Books the way they are. “I want WEC to give me other options,” she said.

Commercial alternatives may not be much cheaper, said Ben Adida, founder and executive director of election technology vendor VotingWorks. And either way, the investment can be worth it, Adida said, because e-pollbooks reduce staff time. That’s especially true at the end of the night when poll workers upload voter data, a task that’s “incredibly tedious” without e-pollbooks, he said.

One advantage of an in-house system is that it can be tailored to a particular state or jurisdiction, said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the Election Center, a nonprofit group representing election officials. Commercial products start off with a basic menu of services, and customizing them can require more time and money, she said.

The disadvantage is that the extent of state support depends on government funding. Commercial options can fluctuate in their ability to support clients, she said, but they aren’t as “susceptible to the whims of legislators and appropriators.”

Commercial alternatives could be coming

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is looking at how to give local election officials access to more options and support.

On May 2, the commission invited clerks to join a committee to evaluate commercial e-pollbook options, working with vendors and the general public. The topic is likely to be discussed at the commission’s July meeting. The commission “looks forward to addressing the committee’s feedback,” said WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe.

The committee won’t assess Badger Books, according to the email sent to clerks, and its work “does not mean that Badger Books will be discontinued.” Other states, the email noted, have multiple approved pollbook models.

The Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association and Wisconsin County Clerks Association have also formed a task force on the future of e-pollbooks, said Hilby, who’s co-leading the group with Portage County Clerk Maria Davis. They aim to compile a list of clerk concerns and expectations by July.

Can commercial options match Badger Book on security?

Forty states had at least one jurisdiction that used e-pollbooks in the 2022 general election. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Colorado use e-pollbooks developed in-house. Other states, like Alabama and Florida, have multiple commercial options. Some states just use one commercial vendor.

Jacobs, the election commission chair, said an advantage of Badger Book is that the commission has access and control over the product, which makes it more secure. It never connects to the internet, unlike many of the added features in commercial products that clerks have said they’d like to have, she said.

“I’m skeptical that a commercial product, especially those that connect to the internet, would be of sufficient security and usability for us to allow for them to be used within our system,” she said.

Haas, Madison’s interim clerk and the former Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator, said the commission also opted for an in-house system because the state’s elections are decentralized and have unique laws. The initial idea, he said, was to see how the in-house system works before considering whether private vendors could move into the market.

While the pilot project worked out, he said, Madison is unlikely to implement e-pollbooks anytime soon. In the long term, he said, the decision will depend on whether the city council wants to pay for it, and whether the election commission can provide enough support.

“Based on what I’ve heard from the staff in working with the technology, I think they would be happy to be able to implement it,” Haas said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Arizona budget proposes millions for Maricopa County recorder as he clashes with supervisors

2025-06-20T21:29:06+00:00

Arizona lawmakers are proposing to give millions of state dollars to Maricopa County’s recorder for election-related purposes, as he fights for more money and control over elections.

The $4.1 million allocated to Recorder Justin Heap’s office is in the fiscal 2026 budget that the Republican-led Senate passed to the House early Friday for final approval. The House and Gov. Katie Hobbs have until June 30 to sign off on a final budget.

Hobbs, a Democrat, had negotiated with the Senate on an initial joint budget proposal, but it was subsequently amended, and it’s unclear if she will agree to the version that passed Friday. Hobbs’ office declined to comment Friday.

The Yuma County Recorder’s Office would also get $1 million for operating expenses under the proposal. No other recorder’s office received such an allocation.

The money for Heap, a Republican who took office in January, appears to be a direct response to his monthslong feud with the Maricopa County supervisors over control of the county’s elections. Lawmakers also added a statement to the budget bill that says supervisors can’t reduce funding to Heap’s office.

Supervisors have already passed a tentative county budget for fiscal 2026 that reduces the recorder’s office budget by about $4.4 million. The reduction was the result of an agreement signed by the former recorder last year that put all of the office’s IT staff, along with part of ballot processing, under the supervisors’ control. But the supervisors have also set aside $5.1 million in contingency funds that could be used for the recorder’s office under a new agreement if needed. The supervisors are scheduled to approve their final budget on Monday.

Heap rejected that agreement after he took office this year, kicking off the fight with the supervisors. He sued the supervisors earlier this month, seeking control of the county’s elections-related IT staff, which maintains and supports the county’s voter rolls, among other tasks. He also wants control over early in-person voting, which in recent years has been controlled by the supervisors. Supervisors earlier this week voted to file a countersuit.

Supervisors Chairman Thomas Galvin declined to comment Friday. He has repeatedly said that the supervisors tried in good faith to negotiate on their elections agreement.

After the supervisors took over the IT staff under the agreement, they proposed giving Heap some IT staff of his own, in part for maintenance and updates to the voter registration system. Heap rejected that agreement and then proposed a different one, which the supervisors rejected. Heap then filed the lawsuit.

If Heap takes over early in-person voting, county staff has estimated that it may create $13 million to $15 million in added costs, because the county supervisors may have to hire more staff, use separate machines and run separate training for Election Day voting. Supervisor Kate Brophy McGee said Friday that she worries that these costs could force the county to cut other priority services, such as public safety.

How did the line item make it into the budget?

Some Republican lawmakers have openly supported Heap in his conflict with the supervisors over elections, but it’s unclear which lawmaker specifically initially added the line item to the budget.

State Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Republican, introduced an amendment Thursday that ordered supervisors to give Heap control of the IT staff and full access to the elections building. That amendment failed.

Hoffman is a leader of the Freedom Caucus, a group of arch-conservative lawmakers that included Heap during his time in the state House.

It’s unclear whether Heap asked lawmakers for the money or they put it in of their own accord. Heap declined to answer that question directly. A public records request to his office asking for any communication he had with lawmakers on the state budget produced no responsive records, according to staff in his office.

Republican leadership in the House and Senate did not respond to requests for comment on the state funds slated for Heap’s office. Calli Jones, a spokesperson for the Senate Democrats, said Friday that the funding for Heap’s office “was a Republican ask that was part of the larger ‘deal.’”

“This is definitely a portion that Senate Democrats would have liked to see handled differently, but overall no one got everything they wanted in this budget,” Jones said.

In a statement to Votebeat after an initial budget was released last week, Heap hailed the funding for his office as great news, and “a welcome resource for my office,” which he said hasn’t received enough funding from the supervisors. He declined to elaborate.

Other counties want election money, too

The millions in the budget for the two recorders’ offices were included on a list of individual appropriations to specific local agencies, such as local fire or police departments.

Yuma County Recorder David Lara said earlier this week that he had asked the Legislature for the money, in part because he might try to hire outside counsel to help with certain issues where he disagrees with the county attorney’s guidance. He declined to identify the issues. As in Maricopa County, the Yuma County supervisors had voted before he took office to take away some of the election-related duties his predecessor had controlled.

Recorders across the state said that Maricopa and Yuma aren’t the only counties that could use additional money.

“As the Legislature considers the budget priorities that best serve Arizona, it stands to reason that providing ALL County Recorders the financial resources necessary to uphold the Arizona Secretary of State-mandated requirements for physical and cybersecurity, to ensure safe and accurate elections, would be among them,” Pinal County Recorder Dana Lewis said in a statement.

Jen Marson, the executive director for the Arizona Association of Counties, wrote to lawmakers last week asking for money for all county recorder’s offices, which need more information technology resources, she said.

“We recognize there are some other policy items wrapped up in the amendment for Yuma and Maricopa, but our concern at this point is the disparity that the Legislature is creating between those two counties and the rest of the counties in the state,” Marson wrote.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Texas is about to expand early voting. Here’s what that means for voters and counties.

2025-06-06T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texans will have a new schedule for early voting in coming years under new legislation that starts the voting period later but slides it right up to Election Day, eliminating the three-day break in between.

Experts say Senate Bill 2753, which lawmakers approved this week, will likely boost turnout, as it includes more time for voting on weekends. The author of the bill, Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican from North Texas, told Votebeat that the change also “simplifies the process” and would reduce the cost of election operations and equipment.

But local election officials said they aren’t so sure of that, and are still determining how it will work and what it could cost counties. The bill doesn’t allocate any funding for counties to implement the changes.

And there’s one notable side effect of taking away the gap after the early-voting period: Partial vote tallies from the early ballots, which are typically released shortly after polls close on Election Day, won’t be available until later, election administrators said.

The bill is headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk for his signature, though it can become law without it.

The changes have to go into effect no later than August 2027. Some election officials warned that they are likely to need additional election workers to work longer hours to comply with the requirements, as well as more voting equipment and possibly additional polling locations.

“These are just things that we don’t know yet because we haven’t run an election in this model yet,” said Jennifer Doinoff, Hays County elections administrator and the legislative committee chair for the Texas Association of County Election Officials. “It’s something we’re going to have to look at and build from the ground up.”

It’s not yet clear when counties would begin implementing the changes. The bill directs the Texas secretary of state to adopt rules and procedures to implement the new timeline and provide a report telling the Texas Legislature “as soon as practicable” after Sept. 1 that the agency “has consulted with county election officials and is confident that the counties in this state are prepared.”

Also, the Legislature could make changes based on the secretary of state’s report, because there is a full regular legislative session in 2027 before SB 2753’s new early voting timeline has to be used.

How the legislation changes early voting

Currently, during general elections that have county and state offices on the ballot, Texas offers 12 days of early voting, starting the 17th day before Election Day and ending four days before Election Day. This allows for only a single weekend of voting.

The new law would also require 12 days of early voting, but the period would begin on a Thursday and run for 12 days straight, including two weekends, right up to Election Day. In addition, Sunday voting hours would be extended from six to nine hours a day, and early voting would also be available on any holidays during that period.

While the number of days doesn’t change, election officials said the new schedule will eliminate a treasured break for workers before Election Day, and they worry they’ll lose workers without it. Some officials also said it can be hard to find people to work Sundays.

In Collin County, the early-voting staffers typically also work on Election Day, said Kaleb Breaux, the county’s elections administrator.

“It’s a laborious process for them, just mentally and physically,” Breaux said. “By the time they get to that last week of early voting, they’re just worn out.”

Election offices also used the break to set up equipment for Election Day voting, which uses a different set of machines.

Election officials will have to work out whether and how to pay poll workers for any overtime. The bill didn’t allocate any funds for counties to pay poll workers.

Hall, the bill author, played down the concerns about staffing, and said he expects some workers would prefer to work on the weekend. “It’s a matter of organization and management,” he said.

Hall said he doesn’t anticipate new personnel costs since the total number of days the polls will be open won’t change.

The bill will also require changes to the way election officials allocate their space and equipment. It will require any location used as an early-voting polling place to also be used as an Election Day polling place, a new mandate. But in some counties, finding and leasing facilities is difficult.

“We’ll have to completely reconfigure early voting,” Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator said.

How the bill could delay reporting of election results

Election officials are also anticipating changes in the timeline for posting election results on Election Day. Early-voting ballots will have to be tabulated at the same time as Election Day ballots, and the extra volume will add to the time needed to complete the security and paperwork steps required after polls close. So tallies from each polling place could take longer to come in, Breaux said.

Hall said he doesn’t expect the timeline for full election results to change very much. The partial results that may be delayed “serve absolutely no purpose in the election process other than to give people a piece of information as quickly as possible,” he said.

“I expect they’ll be able to get the total votes not much later if the counties handle it right,” he said.

The schedule change aligns Texas more closely with 22 other states that have a single voting period that runs right up to Election Day, including Arkansas, Missouri, Colorado, Indiana, California and Illinois, according to the Voting Rights Lab. Hall told Votebeat he didn’t model the bill after any specific state.

In some of those states, making voting accessible the day before Election Day has helped increase voter turnout, said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy Foundation.

“That Monday just right before Election Day, that’s when a lot of folks are really thinking about the election,” Griffith said. “The later you kind of push that last early voting day, the more participation you get.”

Colorado, which is primarily a vote-by-mail state, implemented a single voting period over a decade ago, and it has worked smoothly. For in-person voting, the entire state uses a countywide voting model — where people can vote at any polling location in their county — for the entire voting period. That means election officials have fewer polling locations to staff.

Fewer than half of Texas’ 254 counties use the countywide model. In the rest, voters have to cast their ballot at their assigned precinct, which typically requires more polling locations on Election Day. The number of early-voting sites varies from county to county, and not all of them use the same sites on Election Day.

Texas counties will need funds and resources to implement the changes in the bill, said Jennifer Morrell, CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group, an election administration consulting firm. Colorado reimburses local jurisdictions when there are state or federal candidates on the ballot, Morrell said, and adjusts the amount for changes in poll worker pay and other costs. Texas will need to do the same, she said.

“Costs go up: paper, ink, equipment,” Morrell said. “You can’t just make stuff up and then expect a local jurisdiction to just do it without additional funding. And even if election officials get creative, they can’t maintain it for long.”

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She’s based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

U.S. warns Arizona and Wisconsin over compliance with federal election law

2025-06-05T22:53:50+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

The U.S. Justice Department has sent letters to election officials in at least two key swing states, threatening action against the states if they don’t comply with provisions of a 2002 federal election law.

Lawyers from the department’s civil rights division sent letters in recent weeks to both Arizona and Wisconsin. The Arizona letter said that state officials are not properly verifying voters’ identities as dictated by the Help America Vote Act, and warned of a lawsuit. The Wisconsin letter said the Wisconsin Elections Commission is not properly resolving administrative complaints as required by the same law, and threatened to withhold federal election funds over that issue.

The Justice Department recently sued North Carolina also, claiming that the state has not been properly verifying voter identity.

The department issued a press release and publicly released the Wisconsin letter, dated June 4; Votebeat obtained the previously unreported Arizona letter, dated May 20, through a records request.

The letters are an early sign of how President Donald Trump’s administration is scrutinizing state election practices after his March executive order on elections, which called for stricter citizenship checks and revised voting machine standards, among other things. The Justice Department has also dropped or withdrawn from several voting rights cases dating from before Trump took office again in January.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, responded in a June 2 letter to the Justice Department that state election officials conduct a complete residency and citizenship check and fully comply with the Help America Vote Act when someone registers to vote.

“Arizona has a long history of adherence to voter registration requirements, both state and federal,” Fontes wrote.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission declined to immediately comment on the letter that it received, which noted that the commission has declined to adjudicate administrative complaints against itself since at least 2022, due in part to a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision.

The letter said the commission’s actions “justify a bar” on future grants to the state from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The DOJ appears to be raising a “legitimate” violation in the Wisconsin case, David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former attorney in the voting section of the Justice Department, said after reviewing the letter. But he characterized it as minor and stressed that the agency has limited resources to devote to enforcing voting laws.

The DOJ didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about the letters.

How Wisconsin Elections Commission handles conflict of interest

Under HAVA, any state receiving money for elections must also establish an administrative process allowing people to file complaints about alleged violations of the law. If the state determines there’s a HAVA violation, it must provide an appropriate remedy, the law says; if not, it can dismiss the complaint.

But in recent years, the WEC has been summarily dismissing HAVA complaints that are about the agency’s own actions.

In rejecting those complaints, the commission cited a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion in which Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, said it would be “nonsensical” for the Wisconsin Elections Commission to adjudicate a complaint against itself. Bradley was joined in her opinion by two other justices, and a fourth justice echoed her in a separate opinion in the case.

Becker said that WEC practice probably doesn’t comply with the federal law, which supersedes state laws, especially for federal elections, Becker said.

While the election commission said it would be a conflict of interest to adjudicate complaints against itself, Becker said other agencies “do investigations of themselves all the time.”

Because of the WEC’s position, complainants are left “without any recourse,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote in the letter. The commission’s actions jeopardize future federal funding, she wrote.

But in at least some cases, the agency has told complainants they can appeal a WEC ruling in court, Rob Yablon, a law professor at UW Madison, pointed out. Yablon also said it’s unclear whether WEC’s position that it can’t resolve the complaints could itself count as a determination that meets the requirements in HAVA.

Right now, Wisconsin doesn’t stand to lose much in federal funding over the issue. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission allocated about $272,000 in election security grants to Wisconsin in the 2025 fiscal year, money that has yet to come in, according to WEC Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat.

“The commission would have to decide to take it. We would have to know the conditions of receiving it,” Jacobs said, adding that she questioned “whether or not the work that would be involved in [administering the grants] would justify the receipt of the money when … it would amount to $147.03 per clerk.”

It would take a majority vote of the commissioners for the WEC to begin adjudicating claims against itself, Jacobs said, but she wouldn’t be in favor of it.

“I think our legal analysis is correct: It’s improper for us to be the adjudicating body on whether or not we did something wrong,” she said. “I think that we can have both statutes, both federal and state law, harmoniously work together. And I think that is, in fact, what’s going on.”

WEC member Don Millis, a Republican, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Following the DOJ letter, Republicans in charge of the state’s budget committee delayed a planned session to finalize the election commission’s budget, saying they had to review the Justice Department’s allegations first.

Arizona’s ID number checks are at issue

In both the North Carolina lawsuit and the Arizona letter, the DOJ asserted that the states have failed to require an applicant’s driver’s license number when they register to vote.

North Carolina has since fixed its form to require this information, but it hasn’t contacted every voter who registered through the faulty registration form to provide the missing information. The issue of missing identification numbers was central to the recent challenge to results of the state’s Supreme Court race.

In the letter to Arizona’s secretary of state, Maureen Riordan, senior counsel and acting chief of the voting section of the civil rights division, wrote that HAVA requires the state to request the applicant’s driver’s license number if the applicant has one. If not, a Social Security number is acceptable, she wrote.

The DOJ claims Arizona improperly allows registrants to use either ID number, regardless of whether the applicant has a driver’s license.

The division asked the state to revise the form, and retroactively check all applicants who provided only a Social Security number “to identify any non-citizens.”

Fontes in his response explained that since 2005, Arizona has required voters who register to vote in state and local elections to provide evidence of citizenship and has designed its form to meet that requirement as well as HAVA requirements.

When someone applies, an election official completes what the state calls a “HAVA check” using the state’s driver’s license database to check the driver’s license data, as well as to confirm citizenship, he said.

“Our system and processes ensure that if those individuals have MVD credentials, the number of such credential is included in their voter record,” he wrote.

Correction, June 5, 10 p.m.: An earlier version of this story used an incorrect name for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Pennsylvania Democrats pass sweeping election overhaul through the House, but skip GOP-priority voter ID

2025-05-13T20:20:07+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

HARRISBURG — A sweeping bill to overhaul the commonwealth’s election laws has passed the Pennsylvania House. Its changes would include creating in-person early voting, giving counties more time to process mail ballots, and requiring counties to use mail ballot drop boxes.

But it doesn’t include one provision that will likely be important to its prospects: a voter ID requirement, something that Republicans, who control the state Senate, have always seen as crucial to any election law deal.

State House leaders in both parties have lately said they are open to a voter ID requirement after years of partisan fights. The chamber even advanced a standalone bill, sponsored by two swing-district lawmakers, that would create a lenient voter ID requirement for all in-person voters.

However, a top state House Democrat said that bill was pulled from this week’s voting calendar because some Republicans in the chamber weren’t going to vote for it. Given the limited House Democratic support, the proposal would have been short of the 102 votes needed for final passage.

In a statement, House Minority Leader Jesse Topper (R., Bedford) acknowledged that Republicans have “specific concerns with the details” of the voter ID proposal and said talks are ongoing. Spotlight PA and Votebeat previously reported that Republicans typically back stricter voter ID proposals than the one currently before the House.

State Rep. Tom Mehaffie (R., Dauphin), a co-sponsor of the voter ID proposal, told Spotlight PA and Votebeat that he feels “extremely confident this is exactly what voter ID should look like in Pennsylvania because it makes it constitutional.”

He said he hoped that lawmakers could pass the measure sometime when they return to session in June.

However, even if Mehaffie’s bill passes, the proposal would likely meet a frosty reception in the GOP-controlled state Senate.

In a statement, Kate Flessner, spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana), said that the upper chamber has “been consistent and clear that Voter ID should be implemented through the Constitutional Amendment process,” and not as simple legislation, as the House’s bill, if passed, would be.

“The legislation that is sent over from the House will be referred to the appropriate Senate standing committee for review,” Flesser concluded.

The broad election bill, without voter ID, passed the narrowly divided chamber 102 to 101, with no votes from Republicans.

Meanwhile, election officials on the ground are watching Harrisburg’s maneuvers closely, and county and local election officials told Votebeat and Spotlight PA they worry the House’s bill has contradictions that would make implementing some provisions difficult.

Long-sought changes on pre-canvassing and early voting

The House’s omnibus bill, sponsored by Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia), includes election law changes that Democrats have sought for years in an effort to improve voter access.

One of the most significant is the introduction of in-person early voting.

Currently, Pennsylvania allows a clunky process similar to early voting in which voters can request a mail ballot in person at their county elections office, fill it out, and cast it on site. Some counties also allow this to happen at satellite election offices. But the process has led to long lines and confused voters.

The bill would create a true early voting process, in which voters would be able to cast their vote ahead of time in the same manner they would on Election Day.

At least one early voting location would be required per county, with an additional location for every 100,000 voters. These locations would be open starting 11 days before the election and until the Sunday before Election Day.

McClinton’s bill also includes several process changes that county election officials have been advocating for since no-excuse mail voting was implemented in 2020.

It would allow counties to start preprocessing mail ballots up to seven days before Election Day. Currently, counties cannot begin to process them until the morning of Election Day.

County officials have repeatedly said that opening mail ballot envelopes and flattening the ballots — a process also known as pre-canvassing — is the most time-consuming part of tallying mail votes, and the inability to start the work before Election Day contributes to delayed results.

The measure also would remove the heavily litigated requirement that voters hand-write the date on the mail ballot return envelope, and would prohibit counties from rejecting mail ballots for being returned without an inner secrecy envelope.

If voters forget to sign the return envelope, counties would be required to notify them within 24 hours and provide them with a form, which could be filled out and returned up to six days after the election, to “cure” the error.

Lack of clarity on ballot curing in the state Election Code has led to a patchwork of policies across the state.

The bill would also require a minimum of two mail-ballot drop boxes in every county. It is currently up to individual counties to decide whether they will use drop boxes, and many don’t.

Counties would also be required to start using electronic poll books, which speed up voter check-in and post-voting checks, in all precincts by 2027.

The measure would authorize the Pennsylvania Economic Development Financing Authority to issue a $60 million bond that could specifically “fund reimbursement of counties for the purchase/lease of e-poll books and election infrastructure equipment,” according to the bill’s fiscal note.

It also directs the General Assembly to appropriate $2 million from the state’s general fund for the Department of State to assess and approve new electronic poll books for use in every county.

Some conflicting provisions cause confusion

The McClinton bill, however, appears to include some internal contradictions.

For instance, the measure allows counties to begin processing mail ballots before Election Day but prohibits workers from actually counting the votes during that period. However, that same restriction on tabulation isn’t in place for votes cast through early voting.

“I am not sure if the pre-canvassing thing is a mistake or not,” said Thad Hall, elections director in Mercer County. “Because if they really don’t want us to scan the ballots before Election Day, and we’re going to have early voting, it is contradictory.”

And while the bill eliminates the date requirement on mail ballots, the form that voters would use to cure other errors asks for them to provide a signature and date, raising questions about whether counties could still reject ballots for lacking a date on the form. That could set the state up for more litigation.

Beth Rementer, a state House spokesperson, said voters should provide a date on the cure form, but it is not required, and a missing or incorrect date would not be considered a defect that would disqualify a ballot.

As to the contradiction between pre-canvassing mail ballots and early-voting ballots, Rementer said tabulation is already not allowed before 8 p.m. election night.

Hall said that is incorrect, and that counties are already tabulating mail ballots before 8 p.m., just not reporting results. The law currently says pre-canvassing, which begins at 7 a.m. on Election Day, includes “the counting, computing and tallying of the votes.”

Hall said he appreciates that someone in legislative leadership is finally trying to address some of the issues facing local election officials, such as the long lines at elections offices due to the state’s lack of true early voting and the inefficiencies caused by the pre-canvassing prohibition.

But along with those possible contradictions, he said the bill is written in a way that doesn’t take into account things that affect medium or smaller counties.

Counties are currently required to locate their elections office in the county seat, and the bill would also require an early voting location in the county seat. Hall said this could be a problem for smaller counties, as their county seats often have limited office space.

Hall’s own county seat, the borough of Mercer, is home to fewer than 2,000 residents.

Delaware County Elections Director Jim Allen is skeptical the bill will pass the Senate in its current form, but said that as talks continue, he and other election officials are hoping the legislature will reach out to them for input.

“We can tell them what is going to be a pitfall, what is going to be problematic, and what items are totally impossible, such as the idea that there is equipment that does not count or tabulate,” he said, referring to the pre-canvassing language.

“I’m not aware of any election officials being consulted on this [legislation], that’s the conversation that has occurred [among us].”

Allen later highlighted some aspects of the bill he thinks are positive, including a requirement that those seeking a recount by claiming fraud or error provide evidence. He also praised provisions that criminalize interfering with drop box workers, and said the bill strikes a balance by allowing household members or caregivers, but not everyone, to return others’ mail ballots.

Bradford, the state House majority leader, told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that his chamber’s lawmakers recognize that “perfection is not what we do here.”

“But we need to move forward on these issues,” he said. “We look forward to having more discussions as the process continues on any issues [in the bill].”

Update, May 14: This story has been updated to include additional comments by Delaware County Elections Director Jim Allen.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org. Stephen Caruso is the Capitol Reporter for Spotlight PA. Contact Stephen atscaruso@spotlightpa.org.

Why Trump wants to ban barcodes on ballots, and what it means for voters and election officials

2025-03-28T17:02:34+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump’s new executive order on regulating elections is striking for the way it asserts broad powers for the executive branch that go far beyond what’s prescribed in the Constitution or sanctioned by courts. Experts expect the order to face legal challenges for that reason.

But what’s also striking about the order is how it seeks to dictate some arcane details of the way voting systems work in some of America: Specifically, it bans the machine-readable barcodes or QR codes that are sometimes printed on ballots to help speed up vote counting.

Trump framed this move as a return to secure, paper-based voting. But in reality, the vast majority of Americans already use paper-based systems to vote, and barcodes and QR codes are an integral part of some of those systems. Getting rid of them as quickly as Trump envisions could create confusion, hassles, and steep costs for the jurisdictions that use them, which include some of America’s largest cities. It would slow down vote counts, and wouldn’t necessarily improve their accuracy.

So the language of the Trump order naturally raises questions about how barcodes and QR codes are used in our voting systems, and why the administration is directly targeting these codes as an urgent threat to election security and integrity.

Here’s a closer look at some of those questions:

How are barcodes and QR codes used on ballots?

A fairly typical voting system that’s widely accepted in U.S. elections involves hand-marked paper ballots. Voters check or fill in boxes for their choices, or write them in, and then insert the completed ballot into a machine that reads the selections and tabulates the results.

Some counties in recent years have adopted a different system. In these jurisdictions, including some of the largest metropolitan counties in America, voters use a computer with a touchscreen display to make their selections. Once they’re finished, the computer prints out a completed paper ballot that includes both a human-readable summary of their selections and a barcode or QR code that encodes the same information. Voters have a chance to review the printed ballot before inserting it into a tabulation machine for counting. The machine reads the coded selections, while leaving a paper record that can be double-checked by a human later.

Not all machine-printed ballot systems rely solely on the codes. In many cases, the tabulators can read the marked bubbles or text selections, as with the hand-marked ballot systems. But counties that use barcode-based systems say they allow for faster, more efficient counting without sacrificing accuracy.

What did Trump’s executive order say about QR codes on ballots?

While the Constitution gives state legislatures and Congress the power to determine how elections are run, Trump is aiming to regulate them in part through the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an agency that helps develop guidelines for states and local governments to ensure that their voting systems are secure and accurate, and oversees certification of new systems.

Trump’s order directs the EAC to amend the federal Voluntary Voting System Guidelines to say that voting systems are not allowed to use QR codes or barcodes in the counting of votes, except when necessary to accommodate voters with disabilities.

Trump’s order gives the EAC 180 days to review and potentially recertify voting systems under these updated standards, and rescind certifications based on previous guidelines.

The VVSG sets minimum standards for how election systems should operate. Although they’re officially voluntary, most states use them as benchmarks when choosing election equipment, and many states have laws requiring new voting equipment to meet current VVSG standards, effectively making compliance mandatory at the state or local level.

On Thursday, a coalition of civil rights groups released a letter to the EAC saying it would be illegal for the agency to take action in response to Trump’s executive order. The president “has no authority to direct the Commission” to modify the VVSG, the groups wrote, adding that any such changes must follow the timelines and processes set in federal law.

What is Trump’s concern with systems that use barcodes and QR codes?

The concern involves the demand for voter-verifiable paper records, a system that blends paper ballots with machine verification and tabulation for accessibility, efficiency, and security. Election security experts consider this the gold standard because it ensures that voters can check their selections before casting their ballot, and it creates a physical record that can be used for an audit or recount later if needed. Nearly all U.S. states have transitioned to these types of voting systems, including some that rely on barcodes or QR codes. (Louisiana and some parts of Texas still use electronic systems that produce no paper records.)

Trump’s executive order affirms support for voter-verifiable paper records as the nationwide standard. But his opposition to barcodes responds to the concerns of critics and some election security experts who say barcode-based systems don’t produce voter-verifiable paper records, because what the machine tabulates is based on a code, not the selections that humans can read. The voter can’t truly verify what the machine is reading.

The QR code could theoretically be inaccurate, or manipulated to misrepresent votes, without the voter’s knowledge, these critics argue.

This debate isn’t new. Colorado’s Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in 2019 that the state would eliminate QR codes from ballots as a proactive step to avoid any vulnerability. And former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein fought, unsuccessfully, to have this type of voting machine decertified in Pennsylvania on these grounds.

Georgia passed legislation last year requiring QR codes to be removed from ballots by 2026.

Have there been inaccuracies involving ballots with QR codes in past elections?

One notable case is from Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in 2023, where the choices represented by the machine-generated code differed from the selections that appeared on the human-readable printout. But in this case, county officials said, it was the code that accurately reflected the voter’s choices. A programming error had caused the text version to incorrectly display voters’ choices in a judicial retention race. But the votes were tabulated correctly based on the code.

Barcodes or no barcodes, every state but Alabama requires post-election audits to ensure the accuracy of results.

Which states or counties will be most affected by this order? What would banning QR codes on ballots mean for them?

According to Verified Voting, an organization focused on election technology, there are 1,954 counties spread across 40 states that use voting machines that print QR or barcodes. Some have only a small number for use only by voters with disabilities (and would therefore not have to get rid of them), while other jurisdictions use them for all voters.

Among the users are some very large jurisdictions, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Dallas. The executive order would require those jurisdictions to replace or update all of their machines on a short timetable, costing potentially millions of dollars.

In debates leading up to Georgia’s ban, the costs associated with eliminating QR codes were estimated at up to $66 million for new equipment and software updates.

Portage County, a 70,000-person county in central Wisconsin, just spent $750,000 to switch to ExpressVote machines, which print voters’ choices on a paper ballot and encodes them in machine-readable barcodes — the type of voting machines that may be disallowed under this order.

What’s currently allowed under the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines?

The most updated guidelines, VVSG 2.0, were passed in 2021. No voting systems designed to these standards are yet on the market, but the agency has three systems currently in its certification process.

The VVSG 2.0 guidelines require a voter-verifiable paper trail, according to Kristen Muthig, the EAC’s director of communications. Barcodes are allowed if they “include human-readable representations of the ballot for a voter or auditor to verify,” Muthig told Votebeat. This means codes can be used to speed up machine tabulation, but they cannot be the sole record of a voter’s choices — there must also be printed text that clearly reflects those choices.

How would this change affect voting?

Counties using barcode-assisted systems would need to replace expensive equipment, retrain poll workers, and educate voters, all under tight timelines ahead of the November election. That could cause disruptions and confusion during the initial implementation phases.

Moreover, the removal of QR codes could affect the speed and efficiency of vote tabulation, as optical scanning systems can process QR codes more quickly and accurately than human-readable text.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

How Wisconsin’s Washington County helped its municipalities expand early-voting hours

2025-03-28T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Absentee voting didn’t used to be popular in Addison, a rural town of 3,300 in southeast Wisconsin. A few days before the last Supreme Court election in 2023, only about 60 residents had cast absentee ballots in person.

This year, at the same point in the election cycle, that number was over 300.

The sharp increase is due partly to Republicans’ recent embrace of absentee voting, especially in the nearly two-week period before Election Day when voters can cast absentee ballots in person. Washington County, where Addison is located, is one of the state’s most Republican counties, and one of many Republican-dominated areas across Wisconsin where early voting rates have surged.

But perhaps a bigger reason is a recent Washington County initiative aimed at making early voting more accessible for voters, and more feasible for municipalities. The program compensates municipalities for the costs of extending their hours during the state’s early in-person voting period. It makes up for the gaps in municipal budgets that previously limited early voting opportunities.

“It really comes down to a matter of priorities,” Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, a former municipal clerk, told Votebeat. “And there’s nothing more fundamental to county government and to government in general, in Wisconsin and America, than the opportunity for people to vote.”

County absorbs the added costs for municipalities

The county first rolled out the initiative during the November 2024 election as part of a broader funding package approved by the county board, which included over $150,000 for extended in-person absentee voting hours, voluntary audits, and cameras for ballot drop boxes across the county.

Public funding for such activities is more critical now after voters last year approved a Republican-written constitutional amendment banning private funding for election support, responding to a Republican outcry over private grants to fund election administration, especially in Democratic strongholds.

County Board Chair Jeff Schleif said he was eager to support the proposal because it would ensure that Republicans, who were just coming around to voting early, had the time and opportunity to do it, just as Democrats did in places like Milwaukee.

“Our board is as conservative as it’s ever been,” he said, adding that extending early voting hours is helpful to everybody.

Moreover, Schleif said, the proposal would authorize and fund election audits that could debunk allegations from people like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that some voting machines were being hacked to change votes.

After the November election, about $71,000 of the funds remained unspent. This year, the county signed off on using that money to continue the program into this high-stakes April election.

For this election, the county is compensating municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county are participating, Washington County Clerk Ashley Reichert, a Republican, said. The county also mailed voters a schedule of their town’s early voting hours.

Reichert said the initiative aims to provide local residents with voting opportunities comparable to urban areas, including weekend and night voting options. The additional hours benefit many residents who commute to Milwaukee for work and can’t vote during typical business hours, she said.

“We have quite a few very rural communities where the clerks are very part-time, and their budgets are small, and so for them, offering additional time was just not a feasible option,” she said. “Being able to take the funding off the table as a concern really helped quite a few of our municipalities.”

More hours for voting, and more voters showing up

Addison Town Clerk Wendy Fairbanks said early voting hours have expanded significantly due to the county’s support. In 2023, Addison’s early voting was generally open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Now it’s open as early as 7 a.m. and as late as 6 p.m., including Fridays.

“I’m able to bring in election workers to help me with this so I’m not doing it all on my own,” Fairbanks said. “Otherwise, I’d get no other work done.”

The county’s help, she continued, “takes the burden off the town, so that we’re not using money from our tax levy that could go towards road repair or something in the town.”

Another Washington County municipality, the Village of Richfield, now offers Saturday hours for early voting thanks to county funding. About 90 residents participated this past Saturday, contributing to a total of 1,674 early ballots cast as of Thursday morning — about double the amount from this time two years ago.

Village Administrator Jim Healy said the initiative was crucial for voters who couldn’t vote during regular hours. “We really felt strongly for these types of elections that have either state or national implications that we ought to try to go the extra mile,” Healy said, expressing hope that other Wisconsin counties might follow Washington County’s example.

In all, as of Thursday morning, Washington County had over 13,400 voters cast absentee ballots in person, nearly triple the number of votes at this point in the 2023 cycle and the fourth most in the state, despite it being only the 10th largest county by voting age population.

While increased absentee voting means additional ballots to process, local clerks aren’t concerned about significantly longer counting times.

“This is absolutely adding one more thing,” Schoemann said, “but I also know that their biggest pain point is their budgets. They’re really, really tight. So we want to try to hit their biggest pain point where we can help them and get what voters want, and that is more opportunity.”

Other clerks look at the Washington County model

Reichert, the Washington County clerk, said she has heard from a number of county and municipal clerks, along with legislators, interested in replicating this initiative across the state. Right now, though, she said Washington County appears to be the only county offering municipal clerks that compensation.

That may change soon: At a recent event, Rep. Scott Krug, a legislative leader who formerly chaired the Assembly Elections Committee, said one of his top upcoming legislative priorities was funding early voting so every municipality offers the same availability. He wasn’t available to comment further on Thursday.

Meanwhile, in most counties, early-voting hours are uneven from town to town. In neighboring Ozaukee County, municipal clerks are staggering their hours to try to make time for residents seeking to vote early in person, said County Clerk Kellie Kretlow, a Republican. Some municipal election offices are open every day for early voting, while others are only open a few days across the nearly two-week voting period.

Sheboygan County Clerk Jon Dolson, a Republican, told Votebeat he was interested in the proposal but couldn’t see how his fiscally conservative board would approve a $15,000 funding increase, much less a $150,000 package like the one passed in neighboring Washington County. The county board recently cut the number of positions in his office, he said.

So how did such a large spending proposal for election offices get through the fiscally conservative Washington County Board of Supervisors, which represents one of the most staunchly Republican constituencies in the state?

Schoemann, the county executive, said the board prioritized this initiative after years of disciplined budgeting and surplus management.

He said it was important for officials at the county level to take the lead, rather than expecting local clerks to each ask for help.

The proposals together were billed as an “election integrity package” that would enhance election security — a concern that Republicans have repeatedly raised.

Reichert, the county clerk, said it likely helped that the support for extended early-voting hours was rolled into a broader package addressing security concerns around drop boxes and audits. Extending early voting hours itself addressed a security concern, she said, since some supervisors questioned whether mailed ballots would arrive too late or get lost in the mail.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Election officials face limited options as federal security resources fall away

2025-03-13T23:06:38+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

A nonprofit agency that suddenly lost some of the federal funds it used to provide crucial election security support to states gave more details about the effect of the cuts in an email sent to state government officials on Wednesday.

In a memo obtained by Votebeat, the Center for Internet Security said it is evaluating the impact of the funding cuts and will continue providing many services as it does so, though it didn’t address how long that would continue. Those services include help responding to cybersecurity incidents such as hacking and ransomware attempts, and coordinated sharing of data about threats that can help election officials assess whether something is an isolated event or part of a larger attack.

CIS promised regular updates as it works “to determine how best to support these critical services without federal funding.”

Several states have passed laws in recent years banning private funding or support for election offices, limiting their ability to seek outside help. The CIS memo appears to acknowledge that some state and local officials might need to withdraw from services because of those laws.

“It is recommended that elections organizations contact their local counsel for advice regarding acceptance of services that are not federally funded,” the organization wrote in the memo.

The cuts reflect a broader shift in priorities at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under the Trump administration, which says it is refocusing on “mission-critical areas” and cutting services it considers redundant. CISA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Election officials are still evaluating what the changes will mean, said Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors.

CISA confirmed this week that it had cut $10 million in federal funding for activities under its cooperative agreement with the Center for Internet Security, citing a need to eliminate overlap and redirect resources. A spokesperson said some services — including stakeholder engagement, cyber threat intelligence, and cyber incident response — were deemed “duplicative” and no longer aligned with department priorities. A CISA spokesperson declined to comment further on how these programs were duplicative.

The cuts target two clearinghouses run by CIS: the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or MS-ISAC, and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, EI-ISAC, which provide cybersecurity intelligence, monitoring, and coordination for state and local governments.

The MS-ISAC serves a broad range of government agencies, while EI-ISAC was created specifically to help election officials with targeted threat analysis, real-time alerts, and response support.

CISA had already informed election officials in a March 3 email, obtained exclusively by Votebeat, that it was cutting all funding for EI-ISAC. The agency also confirmed that funding for certain MS-ISAC activities was also being eliminated. According to a CISA spokesperson, the work previously done under MS-ISAC and EI-ISAC “no longer effectuates department priorities.”

The $10 million budget cut represents only a portion of what the Center for Internet Security receives from CISA, so the organization is able to continue some services. It received $27 million in fiscal 2024, according to a federal government website with information on federal spending.

Still, the cuts mark a significant shift in the federal government’s relationship with state election offices, which have depended on CISA and its partners for cybersecurity support. The EI-ISAC, which was established in 2018 following concerns over Russian interference in the 2016 election, has been completely defunded, and the scope of work under MS-ISAC has been reduced.

Many election officials consider these services essential, particularly those without in-house information technology support. Among the services the CIS memo says will continue for now: Albert network monitoring, which helps detect cyber threats targeting state and local government systems. Website protections will also remain in place, preventing users from accidentally accessing dangerous websites that could spread malicious software. Other cyber monitoring services will also continue.

The MS-ISAC executive committee said in its memo that it first learned about the funding cuts on March 6. The next day, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem responded to concerns that state officials raised in a Feb. 21 letter, assuring them that election offices could still access services through CISA security advisers and MS-ISAC.

Noem also said CISA would continue offering cyber and physical security assessments, incident response planning resources, and incident simulations known as tabletop exercises — services election officials had feared losing. But many things remain unclear, as she also acknowledged that CISA is still conducting an internal review of “all election security-related funding, products, services, and positions.”

With the lack of clarity on CISA’s role, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ office is proposing another course — using state funds to pay into CIS or another nonprofit for the services it continues to provide to election officials.

Having states pay into the system may get around laws banning private donations, a spokesperson for Fontes’ office said, and prevent it from becoming overly politicized.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

As he certifies Arizona’s 2024 election, Fontes vows to work on election funding, speed

2024-11-25T22:17:39+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, granted Votebeat an interview about the state’s 2024 election just before he met with Gov. Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes on Nov. 25 to certify the results.

His answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Q: So how did it go?

A: The election went very, very well. I think the voters know that, because they’re not paying much attention anymore. So, no controversies to speak of. Basically, we had some of the same concerns that every election has: a little hiccup here, a minor hiccup there, very localized in some of the counties. Other than that, statewide, we did really well, and I think our preparations paid off.

Q: Where’s the protest this time around? Where are the accusations of fraud?

A: Well, there are none, because election denialism is, I think, officially dead. We’ve shown that using the same systems, the same technology, the same people, in the same state, even with the same candidates, the voters can make a different pick. And that’s just where we’re at. So I think the movement of election denialism is going to be pretty desperate to find any more gas in their tank.

Q: Is it because Trump won?

A: It might be. But even if we had the same kinds of questions [about the integrity of the election], I think they’d [have] the same lack of evidence. Because none of the questions that have been asked before had any evidence behind them. None of the allegations of fraud before had any evidence behind them. So, I guess you can say Arizona’s election systems stand vindicated. Again.

Q: We saw delays in processing [cast ballots] because of the two-card ballot. Do you think that counties sufficiently staffed for that, or did they not think ahead on that point?

A: I think you can make the argument that a lot more resources could have been spent, earlier on, to clear any of the backlog from early voting. But at the end of the day, the counties really only have so many resources, and they knew that there was going to be a big crush at, and after, Election Day. So maybe they didn’t anticipate that they might need more folks earlier, but maybe they didn’t have the resources. And to be honest, election budgets are set well before the election, and these budgets were set well before we knew there were going to be two cards on the ballot.

Q: In Yuma, did you end up sending staff to help there? I know that their crunch had a lot to do with resources, people, space.

A: Yeah, same thing in Apache County. I had staff in Apache County. I had five of my staffers up there for like a week, some longer, just because they didn’t have the resources. But that doesn’t necessarily have to do with planning. It just has to do with the fact that some of these counties are so woefully underfunded by the state government, and none of us have any sustained federal funding.

And let’s not forget: These are federal elections, too, as I’ve been, you know, pounding on the lectern on Capitol Hill several times. You’ve got federal elections, with federal candidates, under federal rules, and no sustained federal funding. It is an unfunded mandate, and we have to fix it at the federal and the state level to get the counties to do their jobs.

Q: But isn’t it also on the state and the counties to fund it better?

A: Oh, 100%. I mean, let’s look at the presidential preference election, for example. The state government doesn’t fully reimburse the counties for this mandatory, party-exclusive exercise. The parties can choose whether or not to participate. It’s up to them. The taxpayers have to pay for it, but the counties have to absorb half the cost, which is unreasonable, and it’s unrealistic. And until we get that dollar amount, which is fixed in statute, changed, we’re going to continue to have this problem.

Q: So will you be asking for that this upcoming legislative session?

We’ve got a laundry list of things we’re going to be asking for this session, and a lot of it has to do with helping the counties do their jobs better. I’m also happily having conversations with members of the Legislature to figure out ways that we can do it quicker as well.

Q: Do you think that all the commotion about the delayed results is justified? Do you want faster results here?

A: I don’t personally think we need faster results, but this is a democracy and I’m not the only one who gets to decide. A lot of people want faster results, and I think we can find solutions. But we do have to work together, and I’m more than happy to do that. I’ve already had conversations with several lawmakers. My role in this conversation will really be as technical adviser. We want to make sure that we’re not sacrificing accuracy, or access, just to get quicker results.

Q: But on access, a big part of that is limiting the early voting [ballot] dropoffs to the Friday before, or some point before, Election Day. Do you support that part?

A: Not without an alternative. Not without the capacity for the ballot to be processed, one way or another. I think it’s wrongheaded to reduce that access, that last couple of days worth of access for voters, just to get faster results. So, again, if it limits access or limits accuracy, I’m going to be against that solution. But if we can find workarounds and fund them, then of course I’m going to be in support.

Q: Some of the quickness of the results, though, in the smaller counties has to do with staffing … or other mechanical things. So shouldn’t counties be taking a look at that, too, to improve the speed?

A: I spoke with one of the lawmakers who’s responsible for purse strings. I’ll just characterize it that way. And I said, look, you know, only a couple of our counties tabulate on site — the vast majority do central tabulation — so you’re talking about purchasing an enormous amount of equipment and the training and the staffing that goes along with them, not to mention the maintenance and insurance and storage costs when you’re not in the middle of your election cycle. These are considerations that folks like me, in my office, will be able to bring to the conversation.

Q: Another thing that came up on Election Day was the bomb threats. Can you talk about what it was like hearing about that the first time?

A: Well, unfortunately, this office has been dealing with threats for years, and we have a pretty strict protocol and a pathway for that information to flow internally. We trained really well with all of our counties on how to approach this type of information, and the result was a very smooth flow of information back and forth between law enforcement and elections officials in our office and law enforcement at the federal, state, and local level. So I think we dealt with it about as well as one could. And the good thing is, because of that clear communication and the preparation, it didn’t expose us to any real delays in voting.

Q: What are you taking away from this election? What are you thinking about going into the next cycle?

A: I think we can fine-tune the preparation that we engaged in. I’m also very grateful for my experience at the county. We have a team here, as you know, that has a whole bunch of former elections officials in it, and I think that’s the first time in a couple generations that this office has been as prepared because of that experience. … And I feel really, really good about that. So is there some fine-tuning that we can do? Yes. Can we lend some support to help some of the counties move other things in different directions? Absolutely.

Q: But there were a few small mistakes and especially by some of the newer administrators. Do you think you did lend enough support from this office to make sure that they were ready to go?

A: There were several examples where we felt like some of the newer folks had a little bit of bumps in the road, where they may not have followed the processes that we were recommending. But we don’t dictate what happens in the counties. All we can do is lend a hand, lend support, and lend the best training that we can, and we did all of that.

Q: All right, switching gears a little bit, in the Washington Post, there is a story saying that the [Department of Justice] might, once Trump is in office, investigate, look back at the 2020 election. What’s your thought on that?

A: I mean, when it comes down to it, we know that there’s never been a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing in 2020. That would be, what do you call it? Spoiled grapes? …There’s no reason to look back at that stuff. We know that 2020 was great. And how do we know? Because 2022 and 2024 used essentially the same systems, fundamentally the same laws, and mostly the same people. And the voters had a different opinion in ‘20 than they did in ‘24. Big deal, right? We’ve got a lot of other issues in this country that we should be dealing with, and I think a look back that way would just be a waste of time and energy.

Q: I have to ask you about the governor’s race. Are you considering it, and is it because there’s something wrong right now?

Let’s make it clear. I was approached by folks who were making these suggestions, and I found it to be very complimentary. And you know, there’s never a reason to say no to the conversation. But I’m focused on being secretary of state, and serving where the Arizona voters have put me. And I’m excited about what the next couple of years hold here. … I’m happy with my team. I’m happy with our performance, and I’d like this to reflect a bit on how great of a job we’re doing now and not worry about the politics of tomorrow.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Q&A: It’s almost Election Day. What should we be worried about?

2024-10-28T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

The last day of voting is in just over a week, and for this newsletter, we thought it best to get out of the way of the experts. We asked three of them — John Merrill, the Republican former secretary of state in Alabama; Kathy Boockvar, the Democratic former secretary of state in Pennsylvania; and Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election technology group — the same three questions.

Here’s what they told us.

What about the coming election keeps you up at night?

Boockvar is concerned about the overall vibe. Deliberate misinformation, fearmongering, and the destruction of confidence in democratic institutions have “led to a powder keg — immense tension and distrust, and encouragement to act out,” she said. “It has also directly led to an increase in threats against election officials, including doxing, swatting, intimidation, and harassment. Regardless of who wins the November election, I am concerned about the human impact of all this.”

Lindeman, as well, isn’t loving the energy. “On good nights, folks like me are up working to help election officials address possible problems that could provide fodder for fearmongers,” he said. “On my bad nights, I worry about whether Americans sufficiently value our free and fair elections and the people who make them happen. We need to cherish and defend the best elements of our political system, elections among them.”

Merrill worries about whether election administrators “are properly prepared, have been properly trained, and are readily accepting their responsibility as election workers leading up to November 5th and continuing past election day through election certification.”

He added: “If those things have not been done, it is too late for them to occur now.”

What concern do you hear a lot that you think is overblown?

“The fears that are introduced by individuals who are ill-informed or uneducated about the elections process tend to take on a life of their own,” said Merrill, who believes many of these fears could be resolved if more people were willing to learn more about how elections work and participate in the process.

“If they dedicated as much time, energy, and effort to supporting the election apparatus in their jurisdiction as they do in demonstrating keyboard courage and trying to stir up false narratives about the elections process, I believe they would be more comfortable with the work that is being done and would ultimately see that the results are safe, secure, and that the transparency in the process has been well demonstrated,” he said.

Lindeman feels much the same. “Overall, many people have been led to accept a generalized vibe that election fraud is rampant — that corruption lurks in the voting machines, or the ballots, or the election officials, or who is allowed to vote, or maybe everything,” he said. “It’s almost an inversion of social reality, like perceiving firefighters as cogs in a nationwide conspiracy to destroy our freedom … somehow.”

Boockvar declined to answer this question.

What do you wish voters understood better about elections?

Boockvar wishes that people better understood the processes and safeguards involved. It’s our “neighbors, friends, and coaches” who work so hard to make sure every vote is counted, she said. Cybersecurity protocols and strict procedures “build in security and verification in every stage and system of our elections.” And then canvassing, reconciliation, and audits come at the end to make sure that the results are accurate.

“Thanks to the people, the science, and the math, all eligible voters can exercise our fundamental right to vote and have confidence our votes are being cast and counted securely and accurately,” she said.

Merrill also wishes folks understood how elections are run. “Education and orientation only take place when an individual is more intimately involved in the administration of the election through proper education, training, and participation in the direct administration of the process,” he said.

Lindeman is excited about how much progress he sees, and about how well the U.S. does in this space — a feeling he wishes more shared. Verified Voting, for example, works to support the use of voter-verified paper ballots to check vote counts. On this and in many other ways, he said, the U.S. has made significant progress in recent years.

“It’s important to see the big picture, which for me is this: U.S. elections are one of the things we do best as a country,” he said. “Vast numbers of good people work together across party lines to keep our elections free, fair, and honest. Well-designed procedures help them prevent, detect, and correct any problems.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Arizona ballot proposition would create open primaries. Here’s what else it would do.

2024-10-07T22:03:58+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Out of the 13 propositions on Arizona’s ballot this year, Proposition 140 stands to have the greatest effect on the state’s elections.

If approved, the Make Elections Fair Arizona Act would mandate open primary elections, ban the use of taxpayer money for closed partisan primary elections, and open up the possibility of ranked choice voting in general elections. Proponents and opponents have argued for months over how best to explain to the public what the proposition would and would not do.

The status of the proposition has been in limbo amid questions about whether proponents had collected enough valid signatures to put it on the ballot.

On Friday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the measure will remain on the ballot, and that votes for or against it must be tallied.

Here’s how each type of statewide election currently works in Arizona, and how a “yes” vote on Proposition 140 would change that:

Presidential preference election

Now: Arizona voters make their selections for presidential nominees every four years in a mid-March election called the presidential preference election. This is separate from the primary for all other offices. Taxpayers pay for the election, but not all voters can participate: Registered Republicans are allowed to cast votes only for Republican candidates, and Democrats can cast votes only for Democratic candidates. Voters who are not registered with a political party are prohibited from voting.

If Proposition 140 passes: Taxpayers wouldn’t fund presidential preference elections unless the parties agree to open them up to voters who aren’t registered with a political party, independent voters, and voters whose party won’t have a candidate on the November ballot; voters who are registered with a party that will be represented on the November ballot would still be able to vote only for their own party’s candidates.

If the parties don’t agree to open up their primaries, they would be required to fund their own presidential preference elections.

Statewide primary election

Now: Statewide primary elections are typically held in August each even-numbered year. (This year, the election was held in July, but that was a temporary change.) Each party holds its own primary election, funded by taxpayers, on the same day and under the same rules. Voters registered with a political party receive a ballot listing only candidates from their party to choose their nominees for the general election. Voters not registered with a political party, or not registered with a party that will be on the November ballot, can select any party’s ballot for the primary. If they are a mail voter, they must actively let the county know each election which ballot they would like to receive in the mail. Otherwise, they won’t be sent a ballot at all. Historically, voters not registered with a political party have had low turnout in primary elections, perhaps due to this requirement.

If Proposition 140 passes: The partisan primary system would be eliminated, but there would still be primaries to see who advances to the general election. All voters would receive the same primary election ballot, and all candidates from all political parties would run against one another. The election would be open to all voters, regardless of party affiliation, and including voters who are not registered with a party.

In races with one officeholder, voters would be allowed to choose just one name from the list of candidates. That list could include Republican candidates, Democratic candidates, and candidates from other parties.

The state Legislature would be required to enact a law by Nov. 1, 2025, deciding how many candidates would advance to the November general election. For a seat with one officeholder, such as for governor, lawmakers would set the number at two to five candidates. For a position with more than one officeholder, such as a state House seat — where each district elects two representatives — lawmakers would pick the number of candidates to advance, within the limits set by the proposition.

If the Legislature fails to enact such a law by Nov. 1, 2025, it would be up to the secretary of state to decide how many candidates would make the general election ballot.

The top vote-getters in the primary, regardless of their party affiliation, would advance to the general election. That means multiple members of the same party could be competing against each other in the general election. For example, if the Legislature decides that two candidates will advance to the general, and the top two vote-getters in the governor race are both Republicans, there would be no Democratic candidate on the November ballot.

Every six years, the Legislature would be permitted to change the law governing how many candidates advance to the general election.

Statewide general election

Now: Arizona operates under a plurality vote system in which the top vote-getter is elected. Even in contests with more than two candidates, the leader does not need to secure more than 50% of votes to win.

If Proposition 140 passes: How the November general election is run would depend on the law enacted by the Legislature governing how many candidates advance from the primary.

For a seat with one officeholder, if the Legislature decides that two candidates advance to the general election, the top vote-getter is elected. If the Legislature decides that three, four, or five candidates advance to the general election, the state would use a system called ranked choice voting, in which voters rank all candidates on the ballot in order of preference. For example, if there are three candidates for governor, the voter would mark their first, second, and third choices.

If one candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes, that person wins the election. If no candidate gets more than 50% of first-choice votes, the procedures from there would be determined by the Legislature. In many ranked-choice voting systems across the country, the person who gets the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated from contention, and the state distributes that candidate’s votes by looking at voters’ second choices.

For a position with more than one officeholder, such as the House seats, the proposition allows state lawmakers to decide how the winner is determined.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Little-noticed statehouse races could reshape election policies next year

2024-09-25T16:22:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Americans agree the fate of democracy rests on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, even if they don’t agree on what that outcome should be. But they may be too focused on the top of the ticket.

A small number of lower-profile state legislative races in districts around the country could shift partisan control of legislative chambers in several key swing states next year, potentially allowing state lawmakers to reshape how elections are run.

“What’s really going to impact most voters when it comes to how they experience their elections — the timing of their elections, when ballots are counted, how things are processed, security and infrastructure changes — that’s all happening at the state level,” said Megan Boler Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that monitors state legislation on voting and elections.

“The makeup of the state legislature is really, really critical to the voting experience of most of the citizens in these states,” Bellamy said. I think it’s something that’s not getting the attention it should.”

In states including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, she said, the Voting Rights Lab is watching how lawmakers handle several key issues: rulemaking around certification and other election administration issues, funding for elections, a push to require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship, and threats to election officials, among other things.

A shift in the balance of power in legislatures could send long-stalled bills on election policy shooting towards approval. It could also mean more abrupt changes in election laws and regulations for long-suffering election officials.

In Pennsylvania, for example, changes in the makeup of the closely divided Legislature could jumpstart efforts to give local election officials time to pre-process mail ballots, a Democratic priority, or a Republican push for new voter identification requirements. In Michigan, voters amended the state Constitution in 2022 to pass several voting and election changes, including allowing early voting and dropboxes, but lawmakers control funding and important choices about how the changes work in practice.

Republicans have long dominated state legislatures, but that means they’re playing defense in more states, a nonpartisan analysis by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found, and Democrats made more gains in 2022 than expected.

Republican and Democratic operatives alike are keenly aware that power and control in some states could shift hands, and both parties are focusing on a small number of seats they say could be decisive.

The prospect of Democrats regaining control of a majority of state legislative chambers for the first time since 2010 is “the greatest long-term threat to our party,” wrote the Republican State Leadership Committee, the party arm that takes the lead on legislative races, in a memo describing spending plans and highlighting battleground races in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states.

The RSLC will spend $50 million in state legislative races this cycle, a new record, the group said.

Will Rusche, a spokesman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the Democrats’ state legislative campaign arm, said that in both the 2022 and 2023 elections, state legislative majorities were decided by extremely close margins. For example, he pointed out, Democrats secured a single-seat majority in the Pennsylvania House in part because one Democrat eked out a victory by just 63 votes. That means either party could gain ground with less investment than might be required to move the needle on a competitive statewide U.S. Senate race, for example, and volunteering on behalf of a candidate could potentially have a big effect.

Rusche said the DLCC is focused on states at a tipping point, where investing resources could change the power balance. For example, he said, Republicans control both houses of the North Carolina Legislature, but flipping a single seat in the state House would take away the party’s supermajority and allow Democrats to sustain a governor’s veto.

“State legislatures are kind of the building blocks of democracy,” he said. “It’s where a lot of our election processes and voting laws right now are being passed.”

Here’s a look at the some of the states where shifts in the statehouse could determine the course of election policy:

Arizona: Democrats hope to chip away at voting restrictions

In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature has been determined to overhaul the state’s election system, but has failed to get any substantive proposals past Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in the last two years. That’s unlikely to change next year, no matter what happens with legislative races in November.

But Democrats may have their best chance in recent history to gain some legislative seats this election, according to some political observers, which would put Republicans’ narrow control at risk.

Wonder Woman herself, actress Lynda Carter, has even weighed in on one closely watched House race, declining to endorse her sister, who is running as a Republican.

A loss of control for Republicans would give Democrats a chance to chip away at Republican-led election policies that restricted voting access in recent years. And, considering that Republicans spent the last two years inviting election conspiracy theorists to speak at legislative hearings and entertaining extreme measures in committee, it would also mean a major change in the way lawmakers do business.

Both parties are keenly aware that every vote could matter in the down-ballot races.

When election officials recently discovered a glitch in state systems that threw into question whether nearly 100,000 voters could vote in state and local races in addition to federal ones, the state GOP pushed for them to have a full ballot. In this case, the largest group of affected voters were Republicans. An analysis showed many lived in key legislative districts, which could be decided by slim margins. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Friday that those voters will remain full ballot voters.

In order to win control of the Legislature, Democrats would need to both pick up seats and defend some vulnerable ones, said Republican political consultant Barrett Marson. Marson expects high voter turnout from young Democrats excited about a ballot proposition that would solidify abortion rights in the state, but he doesn’t know if those voters will take the time to fully fill out their ballot and vote Democratic on down-ballot races, especially given how long the ballot is this year.

If Democrats gain control, or if there’s a 50-50 split, Democrats may try to reverse some of the laws Republicans have passed in the name of election security. They might attempt to repeal a law requiring documented proof of citizenship for voters and bring back the permanent early voting list, which allows voters to receive a ballot in the mail every election even if they don’t ever vote by mail, for example.

A Democratic-led Legislature might also try to create automatic voter registration in the state, which automatically registers residents to vote when they interact with a state agency such as when they get a driver’s license, something that many Democratic lawmakers have said they support.

If Republicans maintain control, expect more proposals to restrict early and mail voting and to eliminate vote centers. Even though Republicans had a one-seat majority in both chambers the last two years, those proposals didn’t make it through the Legislature, in large part because state Sen. Ken Bennett, a Republican and former secretary of state, voted against them.

But Bennett lost his primary race this year to Mark Finchem, a former state lawmaker who has been a leader in the movement to spread election fraud conspiracy theories. A Republican-controlled Legislature next year could also continue to give generous speaking opportunities to those making election fraud claims, while limiting time for others.

Ben Scheel, executive director of the left-leaning group Opportunity Arizona, said that this would continue to erode voter confidence.

“It’s completely damaging to voter confidence when you have entirely unfounded claims going on in the government-sanctioned, institutionally sanctioned committee hearings,” Scheel said. “It makes it look like it’s true, and it’s just not true.”

— Jen Fifield

Michigan: Laws related to Proposition 2 are at stake

In 2022, for the first time in decades, Democrats won control of both chambers of the Legislature, while holding on to the three statewide offices: governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. But they don’t hold the legislative majority by much: Control hinges on two-seat margins in the House and Senate.

Polling shows several statehouse races are nearly tied. If Republicans were to reclaim either chamber, the divided control would likely slow the passage of election legislation that Democrats have pushed for. If Republicans win back the House and Senate, first on the chopping block could be election laws that the party has opposed over the past two years.

That’s likely to include laws such as Public Act 74, which changes the requirements for recounts and includes felony charges for those who “willfully interfere” with recounts. The law wouldn’t go into effect until three months after the 2024 session fully adjourns, which hasn’t happened yet.

Republicans could also seek to weaken the laws prompted by 2022′s Proposal 2, which amended the state constitution to expand voting access, including early in-person voting. That could take a variety of forms, including limiting how jurisdictions conduct early-voting days.

A Republican majority would also imperil any bills that don’t make it through the legislature this year, such as the proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act. The package of bills, which aims to reinstate some of the protections of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act that were weakened by the courts in recent years, passed the Michigan Senate just last week, moving on to the House committee on elections.

The legislation has been criticized by Republicans for going beyond federal standards.

“These bills would cost taxpayers millions of dollars and create new obstacles for our clerks and local units of government that are simply unnecessary,” Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican from Holly and a former secretary of state, said in a news release after the Senate passed the bills. “These bills go far beyond the voting rights protections already afforded to all of our citizens under both the U.S. and Michigan constitutions, and they would create a huge new bureaucracy under the secretary of state that would help interest groups sue our local units of government and our hardworking clerks.”

— Hayley Harding

Pennsylvania: Partisan shift could ease gridlock on election bills

All of the state House’s 203 seats and half of the state Senate are up for grabs this year. Pennsylvania currently has the nation’s only split Legislature, with Democrats in control of the House and Republicans holding the upper chamber.

Democrats hold the House by the thinnest of margins: A single seat. Any losses there could put both chambers squarely in the hands of Republicans, since the Senate is unlikely to see a shift.

The closely divided Legislature has essentially meant gridlock on election legislation. Early hopes for a grand bargain packaging both parties’ priorities came to naught. But shifts in control could shake legislation loose.

If Republicans win, they could return to a tactic they deployed in previous sessions: going straight to the voters with proposed constitutional amendments that get around the threat of a veto by the Democratic governor. Republicans could use this tactic to revive stalled voter ID legislation, though they would have to maintain their control during the 2026 midterm elections, since constitutional amendments have to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions before going on the ballot.

Democrats are unlikely to win control of the state Senate, but if they do and also manage to maintain or expand their House majority, they could have an easier time passing their voting priorities, such as allowing pre-canvassing of mail ballots, which speeds the tabulation and reporting of results, and same-day voter registration.

“The very slim majority for Democrats in the House has made it difficult for them to get anything done,” said Kyle Miller, a policy advocate with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy. And unless the Senate flips or becomes evenly split, giving the Democratic lieutenant governor a tie-breaking vote, Miller said, “we’re going to see more of the same” next year.

— Carter Walker

Texas: Race for state House speaker looms large

The fate of new election legislation in Texas could depend less on the outcome of the November elections, and more on who wins the race for House speaker in the next session.

Republicans easily control both chambers of the legislature, but some GOP-backed election administration and voting legislation stalled in the state House last year, including a proposal to eliminate the widely used countywide polling place program and a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Some Senate Republicans and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have blamed House Speaker Dade Phelan.

Most proposals approved by the Senate last year “never even received a hearing in committee,” Patrick said in a statement in August. “The Texas Senate passed 23 election-related bills that did not pass the House. These bills would have been a step toward restoring the public’s confidence in fair and honest elections in the State of Texas. It’s an absolute disgrace that Speaker Phelan killed these critical bills.”

Phelan, a Republican from East Texas, is likely to win reelection in November, but whether he’ll be selected again as speaker is up in the air: At least five House Republicans and one House Democrat are challenging him for the gavel.

Phelan narrowly survived a primary challenge this year after he supported the 2023 impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican, on corruption and bribery charges. Paxton was acquitted.

A change in speaker could lead to other changes affecting the Legislature’s handling of election bills. Phelan has been criticized within his party for sometimes appointing Democrats as committee chairs, though the House committee on elections has been led by Republicans. Experts say the choice of chairman next year will dictate how quickly legislation advances between the two chambers, and whether election and voting legislation championed by the most conservative Republicans will stall again.

Something else to watch: Republicans are widely seen as attempting to establish a supermajority that would make it easier to pass such bills, as well as other conservative priorities such as school voucher legislation.

“People think that Democrats don’t have a say in governing because they’re in the minority of the legislature, but that’s not true. They do have a significant say,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “They can really gum things up if they wanted to, and they will if they don’t get a speaker who they think is right or that will work with them. The House Speaker is a traffic cop for the house’s agenda, and so how much trust they have among the members and their skills at navigating a tense session is critical.”

— Natalia Contreras

Wisconsin: Impact of a potentially split Legislature isn’t clear

The composition of the Wisconsin Legislature is all but certain to change significantly under new legislative maps that undid what experts deemed some of the most gerrymandered political boundaries in the nation. Under the previous GOP-drawn maps, Wisconsin Republicans were just a couple of seats short of a supermajority in both chambers, which would have allowed them to override a veto by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, on election legislation.

The new maps make Democrats more competitive, but they still aren’t likely to gain a legislative majority in both chambers this cycle. Senate elections are staggered, so Democrats’ hopes of a majority will almost certainly have to wait until 2026. But they do have a chance of flipping the Assembly.

If they do, it would be the first legislative session in more than a decade with split control. It’s unclear whether that would affect which election legislation reaches the governor’s desk, because many of the bills that clerks and liberals have prioritized — for example, a bill that would have allowed clerks to process absentee ballots the day before the election — passed through the Assembly but didn’t receive a Senate vote.

Other bills, such as a proposal to bring Wisconsin in line with the federal Electoral Count Reform Act, passed the Senate but not the Assembly. A Democratic Assembly majority, or even a slimmer Republican majority, could lead to that bill passing in next year’s session.

One area where a Democratic Assembly majority could matter is the budget. Every two years, the Legislature processes different agencies’ budget requests. Last time around, legislative Republicans rejected a Wisconsin Elections Commission request to fund an office focused on building transparency and focusing on election compliance.

The commission has a similar request in the upcoming budget, and it could get through if Democrats land an Assembly majority, giving them more seats on the budget-writing legislative committee.

But beyond narrow requests and compromises, other Democratic priorities — like reducing the residency requirement, letting 16- and 17-year-olds preregister to vote, and expanding early in-person voting — are unlikely to pass through the Legislature in the upcoming session. They stand a chance if Democrats secure a Senate majority in 2026.

— Alexander Shur

Correction: Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee spokesman Will Rusche’s name was initially misspelled.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

What cost comparisons show about Michigan’s early in-person voting models

2024-06-21T14:52:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

The city of Ann Arbor recorded one of the state’s highest rates of early in-person voting in the February primary, and a Votebeat analysis shows it also succeeded in another important measure: It kept the cost per vote low.

Ann Arbor spent about $19 per early in-person vote, among the lowest of dozens of municipalities included in the analysis, which gauged only recurring costs like labor.

In Lansing, a city similar in size to Ann Arbor, the cost per vote was triple — around $58 — and the turnout rate much lower.

Meanwhile, in sparsely populated Ontonagon County in the Upper Peninsula, municipal election officials banded together under a countywide plan. Ontonagon County spent about $63 per vote, though that cost was spread among a dozen municipalities.

The Votebeat analysis examined different models of making early in-person voting available to determine which were most cost-efficient, and which led to the highest rate of early in-person voting. That’s the percentage of all voters in the primary who used the early in-person option.

The data did not reveal a clear, overarching pattern, but instead showed several trends that could offer insight for improving efficiency and boosting turnout.

The analysis also highlights the varied factors that can influence cost and turnout. Some are within clerks’ control, and others are not.

The February primary, notably, was a low-turnout election overall, with only 23% of registered voters casting ballots. And interest in early voting in some places hinged on unique factors, such as University of Michigan students in Ann Arbor with a strong interest in voting “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary and casting ballots before spring break, when election day fell.

In November, when far more people are voting, the cost per vote will probably go down. Meanwhile, as awareness of the early in-person option grows, more people will use it.

Clerks who spoke with Votebeat about the analysis stressed that voters by a wide margin approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing an early in-person voting option, because they wanted to boost ballot access, regardless of cost.

It is “a mandated service that voters have told us they want,” said Ed Golembiewski, a former Washtenaw County deputy clerk.

“Implied within that is that they aren’t concerned that it costs more money, or the convenience of early voting offsets concerns about it costing more money,” Golembiewski added. “That said, we have a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers, and election officials are efficient people by nature, so we’re certainly trying to provide this in a way that is cost effective, but also provides as much service to voters as we can.”

Among the analysis’ primary findings:

While clerks all say partnering with neighboring municipalities reduces costs, it does not always produce a high early in-person voting rate or improve voting access.
Among jurisdictions and municipalities that conducted their early voting themselves, the more populous ones typically had lower costs per vote than smaller municipalities.
The costs and turnout rate for different municipalities and jurisdictions were likely influenced by a range of factors, including the number of early in-person vote sites, and how vigorously each clerk’s office promoted the option.

How Votebeat analyzed early voting costs

The February presidential primary marked the first statewide election in which Michigan adopted the new rules required by Prop 2, a 2022 ballot initiative approved by 60% of voters that aimed to expand voting access.

Among other provisions, it mandated nine days of early in-person voting. Local clerks can implement that with one of three approaches: run their own early voting setup, cooperate with neighboring municipalities, or enter into a countywide arrangement, in which county election officials coordinate the process and strategically distribute polling places.

The analysis estimated the cost per vote based on the number of early in-person votes cast and the operating costs that clerks will incur each election, such as poll worker wages and some supplies. State law and the election manual require two election workers to be present at each location for 10 hours per day, though some were open for 12 hours.

Because this was Michigan’s first election with early in-person voting offered statewide, Votebeat’s analysis of cost per voter offers a unique data point without a comparable benchmark. Election day voting — given the higher volume of voters — will tend to be more cost efficient.

Nonetheless, the numbers provide an initial data point for officials to explore the most effective early voting approach in future elections.

The analysis did not factor in upfront costs for equipment like tabulators, computers, or software. The vast majority of those costs were covered by a one-time, $30 million allotment from the Legislature.

The Legislature’s allotment also covered much of municipalities’ poll worker costs for 2024, but it is unclear whether the state will continue that in 2025 and beyond.

Votebeat compared costs and turnout rates for a range of jurisdictions. Some were large, urban centers, like Lansing and Ann Arbor, each with electorates of more than 70,000 voters. Others were smaller communities that coordinated the early voting on their own, such as rural Bridgewater Township in Washtenaw County, and Harrison Township in Macomb County, each having fewer than 2,500 voters.

Some smaller communities banded together in a larger jurisdiction, as in Washtenaw County, or rural Ontonagon County. Some of Michigan’s largest jurisdictions, such as Detroit and Macomb County, did not respond to Votebeat’s requests to provide their cost numbers.

Joining forces vs. going it alone

Clerks say it is more cost effective for smaller municipalities to partner with neighboring communities to form larger early-voting jurisdictions, because the arrangement offers economies of scale, especially in administrative costs. Communities that share voting sites need fewer places than if each opened their own, which significantly lowers labor costs.

The benefits can be seen in Washtenaw County, where 23 municipalities joined forces under a jurisdiction that spent about $16.72 per vote, the second lowest cost in the analysis. By contrast, two municipalities in the county that opted not to join the countywide jurisdiction had much higher costs: $44 per vote in Ypsilanti Township, and $86 in Bridgewater Township.

Bridgewater, though, did see a relatively high rate of early in-person voting, suggesting that proximity to an early voting site is helpful, if costly, for small municipalities. Milan, which spent $73 per voter, saw a similar effect.

In Ingham County, which includes much of Lansing, most municipalities chose to go it alone. It would have been more cost efficient for many of the smaller townships and cities to work together, said Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum. Such partnerships could save hundreds of thousands of dollars statewide, she added.

“I’m glad to see some of them partner up, but I wish more of them would,” Byrum said.

However, the partnerships may not improve access. In Ingham County, three municipalities worked together: Vevay Township, Onondaga Township, and Aurelius Township. For Byrum, who lives in that area, that meant driving at least 15 minutes to her early-vote location, which was farther than her local township hall where the early in-person vote would have happened had the township run its own site.

“Requiring a 15-minute drive did not make it more accessible,” she added.

One factor influencing how clerks decide to operate is whether they are full time. Many in smaller communities are not, and that forces them to work as part of a larger jurisdiction. Ontonagon County consolidated its early voting because of that challenge, said McMillan Township Clerk Kay Richter.

Even though the partnership was designed to limit costs, Richter didn’t think the result was worth it. The county served 71 early voters, at a cost of $63 per vote.

“It was a total waste of time, energy, and money to run an EV site in Ontonagon County,” Richter said. “I highly doubt that it increased total voter turnout for the primary. In my opinion, we paid people to sit and do almost nothing for nine days.”

In Ann Arbor, the high turnout rate highlights how decisions made by clerks can boost turnout while keeping the cost per vote relatively low. The city offered six in-person voting sites, which pushed its labor costs up to about $50,000, City Clerk Jacqueline Beaudry said.

The city partnered with the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor District Library, and located voting sites where there is a high volume of public traffic, including in the mornings and evenings, when people typically vote.

“A large part of our success was location, and our plan was ‘What is best for our voters?’” Beaudry said. “We were all around the community at different times, so whatever worked best for the voter, we were there for them.”

Ann Arbor’s turnout may also have benefited from the timing of U-M’s spring break, which occurred during the week of the Feb. 27 election. Many students were not going to be on campus on that day, which likely boosted participation in early voting. The interest among some U-M students to cast a ballot for “uncommitted” as a protest vote against President Joe Biden’s policy in the Israel-Hamas war may have also factored into the high tally.

By contrast, East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, had a relatively low early-voting turnout and the highest cost in Votebeat’s analysis, at about $119 per vote. MSU’s spring break was at the same time as U-M’s, and the city offered an early in-person voting site on campus. East Lansing City Clerk Marie Wicks did not respond to a request for comment.

Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, said clerks will figure out how to balance cost efficiency and boost access as they get more experience with the early in-person voting option, and voters become aware of it.

“We have to figure out a way to make sure that an early vote site is accessible to voters while keeping in mind personnel restraints on our smaller townships and cities,” she said. “And we need to figure out which agreements best serve our voters.”

Votebeat contributor Tom Perkins is a freelance reporter in Hamtramck, Michigan.

Election administrators struggle to navigate bans on outside assistance

2024-06-03T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Good morning,

Wisconsin last month became the 28th state since the 2020 election to ban private funding for election administration, the latest in a remarkable wave of legislation.

The new laws all stem from a conservative backlash to millions of dollars in private grants awarded for the 2020 election that were primarily funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, but awarded by nonprofits. The wording of the bans varies from state to state, with some restricting the acceptance of private money and others also prohibiting the acceptance of free services and volunteer work.

That means election officials around the country, and organizations that work with them, have had to figure out what they are and aren’t allowed to accept or offer.

At an annual conference on Election Science, Reform, and Administration hosted by the University of Southern California in May, for example, organizers posted a sign on the lunch table reading, “Please Note: If you are a public official and do not have a speaking role at this event, the food and beverages are reportable gifts.”

An attendee said it had not appeared at past such conferences, though the language was approved by the legal affairs staff at the university and is used when public officials are in attendance at events, according to Christian Grose, the academic director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute and one of the event hosts.

The ambiguity is contributing to a chilling effect among election officials, said Rachel Orey, the senior associate director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, as election officials under unprecedented scrutiny worry about making a misstep.

“The biggest challenge we’re witnessing is the uncertainty about what is covered,” Orey said.

The bans differ by state, and advice has been hard to come by. Organizations like the Bipartisan Policy Center that work with election officials across the country are worried about violating the laws themselves, as well as accidentally leading election officials to do so.

For example, Orey said, Ohio’s law banned officials from collaborating with nongovernmental entities, a restriction local election officials said would keep them from participating in the BPC’s advisory task force of election officials. But in 2022, the state attorney general issued an opinion saying the ban only applied to officials “acting in his or her official capacity,” leaving them to then wrestle with what that meant. Ohio election officials continue to serve on the task force, but the ambiguous wording wasn’t helpful.

A Tennessee law requires election officials to file a form with the secretary of state within 15 days of attending any out-of-state seminar, conference, or training program about elections, disclosing who paid for it, even if the official took no outside funding.

Others are also proceeding cautiously. The Elections Group, an elections consulting firm, typically provided many services to local officials pro bono, such as consulting on best practices for post-election audits or signature reconciliation. It has begun posting as much guidance on best practices as possible publicly on its website, said CEO Jennifer Morrell, such as guides to chain of custody or templates for posters that can be customized.

If officials in states with such bans want more consulting help or resources, she said, the Elections Group has to charge. Often, she said, election officials don’t have the budget to pay, “and we know that.” Because of that, she said, they’ve tried to post as many free resources and customizable templates online as they can.

Morrell, like Orey, said the laws have “a chilling effect on election officials who are reluctant to engage with outside groups for fear of accidentally violating the law,” stopping them from reaching out to outside agencies or organizations for help. “There’s probably a bigger effect than we realize,” she said.

In Florida, Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County and a past head of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association, said he was initially concerned about whether the state’s law restricted election officials from participating in meetings run by outside groups, but has found that not to be so. Earley also said he is a member of the executive committee of the Elections Infrastructure and Information Sharing & Analysis Center, commonly referred to as EI-ISAC, run by the nonprofit Center for Information Security. He was worried he would have to absorb all the costs of his travel to EI-ISAC meetings, but is still allowed to let the group pay for that.

Election supervisors were also able to convince lawmakers to make donations of polling place spaces exempt from the law.

The biggest hindrance under Florida’s ban has been that Earley can no longer use volunteers to help with voter outreach and education efforts, he said.

For example, Earley said, a church would reach out and offer to staff a table with voter registration information if his office sent a staff member to collect documentation.

Now, he said, he can’t accept the free help, which means paying staff, often on evenings and weekends. It “costs more and it’s not as easy to organize,” he said. “Now instead of one person going out and doing it, we need a team.”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Georgia bill to strip QR codes from ballots would cost tens of millions of dollars

2024-05-02T19:30:56+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Update, May 13, 2024: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed this bill, SB 189, on May 7 without releasing a statement. Any funding for this measure will need to be addressed by the legislature in future sessions.

Tucked inside a massive elections bill passed last month by Georgia’s legislature is a provision that requires the state to spend millions of dollars to overhaul the state’s existing voting system, or to purchase a new one before 2026.

Election officials and experts say it’s an impossible timeline, and that the vague language of the bill may prevent the use of electronic tabulators altogether. Lawmakers allocated no money for the change, which would remove computer-readable QR codes and other barcodes that the state’s voting system relies on to accurately tabulate ballots.

“We’re talking about an expense of about $25-to-$26 million, to about $300 million, depending on how you want to do it,” Gabe Sterling, the chief operating officer in the secretary of state’s office, told the House Governmental Affairs Committee on March 20, eight days before the bill passed the House. If lawmakers wanted to proceed, Sterling told them, they should write the legislation to make the changes contingent on appropriating enough money to pay for them, and move the effective date back to give election officials more time.

Lawmakers have already pushed the effective date back two years — from 2024 to 2026 — but did not make the change contingent on providing funding. So if the governor signs the bill now, it’s not clear where election officials will get the money.

The ban on computer-readable codes made headlines when the bill passed, but the cost — which legislators have known about for months — has not been previously reported.

The legislation would make the state’s current voting system, put in place in 2020 at a cost of more than $100 million, impossible for the state to use. Sterling says that if the governor signs it, Georgia will spend millions of dollars “to achieve absolutely nothing.”

And depending on how the secretary of state’s office chooses to interpret the coding provisions, the cost could spiral. Because the state’s current system is designed to read QR codes, the least costly fix requires the office to update every single piece of voting equipment in the state — about 40,000 pieces of hardware, each requiring about 25 minutes of individual attention — and purchase a limited amount of new hardware.

The more expensive option would mean purchasing an entirely new system capable of optical character recognition, a technology for scanning and interpreting individual letters. The options for that likely won’t be available in necessary quantities before 2026.

Sterling believes either avenue is likely to lead to a lawsuit. He said the unclear requirements would also put the state and counties at great risk of lawsuits.

“People who like this and people who don’t like this will sue us,” he said, because there is no consistent understanding of how the language should be enforced. “The words in the bill do not make sense.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp must sign or veto the bill by May 7.

QR codes ‘may be perfectly fine’

The provision about computer-readable codes is a small part of the 24-page elections bill, which has provisions ranging from chain-of-custody requirements for equipment to the creation of pilot programs for new voting technology. A veto would force the state legislature to try again on the package.

In a statement, Kemp spokesman Carter Chapman said that the governor is still reviewing the bill, and that his office would provide an update after taking action.

Election integrity activists have been fighting the use of QR codes on ballots nationwide, claiming without evidence that such codes could be used by malicious actors to swing elections. State Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Max Burns, the Sylvania Republican who sponsored the measure, said it would “create clarity” and allow voters to know the machine interpreted their votes the same way they do.

“It is technically possible to remove the QR code or any other encoded, non-human readable content and read the actual content of the ballot,” he said in January. “We’re gonna leave the details and the technical requirements up to the secretary of state as they work through the implementation of this.”

In another hearing that month, he said the scanning of human-readable text could be “integrated” into the state’s current system. While that’s technically possible, Sterling said, the process will be slow and expensive in ways the bill doesn’t account for.

House Speaker Jon Burns acknowledged at a January press conference that he had a limited understanding of the issue, but nonetheless said he believed the transition would be “easy.”

“If you understand how the QR code works exactly, I’d be glad to meet with you after this, and certainly you can help me,” he said. Pressed by reporters for evidence of flaws with the current system, he said that QR codes “may be perfectly fine” but that the public’s lack of confidence was reason enough to make the change.

That was a popular rationale for many who voted to pass the bill in the House. But prior to the vote a few weeks ago, state Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat, said lawmakers were “justifying sloppy and rushed policy choices by saying we need to bring more confidence to our elections, when you know just as well as I do that there is a very vocal minority out there who will never be confident in the process so long as their candidates is not declared the winner.”

She compared the bill to “negotiating with terrorists.”

Lawmakers were warned of the risks

The relevant section of the bill bans the use of “a QR code, bar code, or similar coding” to count ballots. All counting, it says, must be done using human-readable text, even though no voting system currently exists that meets that requirement as written.

One system, from Texas-based Hart Intercivic, has such a feature, but the small company is unlikely to be able to produce enough machines to replace every scanner in Georgia in the next two years. And even those rely on computer programming: Scanners aren’t human beings, says Sterling. They have to be programmed to read English words and characters in place of codes.

Records show Sen. Burns and Speaker Burns (who aren’t related) and other legislators ignored warnings from the secretary of state’s office sent over several months, which described this change as “impossible” to implement and “a solution in search of a problem.” Neither lawmaker has responded to requests for comment.

Given the wording of the bill, counties may be prevented from using scanners at all, said Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County, a county of about 100,000 voters in northwest Georgia.

“A strict interpretation of the bill could force us to hand-count ballots, which is substantially less accurate than scanning them,” said Kirk. “I hope the legislature will work with Georgia’s election officials in the coming years to allow us to continue to provide accurate results as we move toward the next generation of voting technology as required by the bill.”

Other developed countries do hand counts, but U.S. elections typically have significantly more choices. And academic studies over the decades have found that hand-counting American elections is error prone, slow, and expensive.

In multiple letters and meetings with lawmakers over several months, the secretary of state’s staff offered proof that the underlying claims of QR code manipulation were being taken out of context or misinterpreted. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has suggested other options to audit the count. The state also already requires risk-limiting audits by law.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Wisconsin ballot questions on election administration are too vague, officials say

2024-03-29T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Update, April 15, 2024: Wisconsinites approved both election administration-related constitutional amendments on April 2. The constitutional amendment prohibiting election officials from receiving private grants received just over 54% support, and the amendment prohibiting anyone but election officials from performing a task in the conduct of an election received 58.6% support.

Wisconsinites will vote Tuesday on two proposed amendments to the state constitution that could reshape how elections are run in the state — but voters, and many election officials, don’t know exactly how the broadly written proposals would be interpreted by state election officials and the courts.

Election officials said the second proposal could have especially unpredictable consequences. That one seeks to ban anybody besides election officials from performing “any task in the conduct of any primary, election, or referendum.”

How strict would that ban be? Would it mean that elections officials couldn’t hire private companies to print ballots or assemble voting machines? Or that they couldn’t ask other city workers to set up polling sites? Officials and experts aren’t sure.

“It’s a very poorly written provision, because it is so vague,” said Mike Haas, Madison’s city attorney and the former administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. He said the wording used in the amendment isn’t defined in state law.

Differing interpretations could play out in lawsuits if the measure is enacted.

The two Republican-written ballot questions coming before voters Tuesday are largely a response to 2020, when private groups and outside consultants got involved in funding and assisting election administration across the state and country in the midst of the pandemic.

Did you vote for the first time this year? Let us know how it went.

The first proposed amendment seeks to prohibit the use of private grants or cash donations for election costs. That stems from a national GOP backlash to millions of dollars in election administration grants awarded in 2020 to communities around the country, including more than 200 jurisdictions in Wisconsin. The grants, from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, flowed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit.

The second, the proposal that seeks to restrict election-related tasks to election officials only, is meant to address a situation related to outside grants that arose in Green Bay in 2020, when the city worked with a consultant who had ties to outside funders. If the proposal is interpreted broadly, it could force major changes to elections in a swing state during a presidential election expected to spur high turnout.

That amendment could be interpreted to ban some non-election municipal workers from helping with voting-related tasks, such as city police escorting workers transporting ballots or the IT department providing cybersecurity for voter registration systems, Haas said. The proposal could also ban outside workers from transporting voting machines or troubleshooting election equipment, he added.

Some proponents of the amendment say the worries are overblown.

“We do not believe that the proposed amendment covers either printers who print the ballots or the companies that manufacture voting machines,” said Rick Esenberg, president of the conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which frequently files lawsuits over questions of election administration. He added that he didn’t think it would prevent non-election city workers from setting up polling sites, either.

But if it did, it’s not clear what election officials would do instead.

“All of those employees of those companies are doing things that, if they didn’t perform those, we would not be able to conduct the election,” Haas said.

Questions about whether the proposal applies to private vendors building voting machines, printing ballots, and programming them would likely end up being the subject of a lawsuit, said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, an elected Democrat who oversees elections in Wisconsin’s second most populous county.

“It’s sort of nuts,” he said about the proposal. “It is so unclear and, honestly, unthought-out that it would be up to a judge to decide these things.”

Other election officials also said the effort to prevent a repeat of the Green Bay situation creates unanswered questions, and may go too far.

“The intent is a good thing,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican, about the proposal. “I just think there needs to be a little bit more clarification on some of the details.”

Zuckerberg’s donations for grants fired up Republicans

The first ballot question is meant to prohibit grants such as those awarded by CTCL in 2020, which added up to more than $10 million to communities around Wisconsin. Grants were awarded to any eligible community that applied, CTCL said, but most of the dollars in Wisconsin went to Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha — the state’s largest cities, and Democratic strongholds.

The amendment’s sponsors, Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Green Bay, and Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Lake Geneva, charged in a memo that “targeted private ‘donations’ were shown to dramatically increase turnout for one party.” Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led a partisan, taxpayer-funded review of Wisconsin’s 2020 vote, also seized on the donations, claiming the grants were “a wave of massive election bribery.”

Academic research has found otherwise. One study, published in October 2023, said that while “counties that favor Democrats were much more likely to apply for a grant, we find that the grants did not have a noticeable effect on the presidential election.”

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave hundreds of millions of dollars to CTCL — funding that was doled out to some 2,500 election departments in 49 states, the nonprofit said. But some Wisconsin communities, including Madison, had received CTCL grants even before the tech billionaire made his donations.

Conservative-allied groups filed lawsuits over the grants, arguing they were illegal under existing state law, but lost in court. State lawmakers then passed a bill to ban them, but Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, vetoed it in June 2021, saying it would have unnecessarily restricted “the use of resources that may be needed to ensure elections are administered effectively.”

Conservatives then turned to the constitutional amendment, which uses language similar to the vetoed legislation. Governors in Wisconsin can’t veto constitutional amendments.

Twenty-seven states now ban, limit, or regulate the use of private funds to run elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. All those laws were enacted after 2020.

If the proposal passes, the state constitution would be amended to ban government employees from applying for, accepting, expending, or using “any moneys or equipment” donated by an individual or nongovernmental entity in connection with a primary, election or referendum.

As for the second proposal, Green Bay in 2020 accepted more than $1.2 million in CTCL grants, funding that a city official said was needed because of the pandemic. The clerk’s office had exceeded its 2020 budget after the April election, according to an April 2021 report from Vanessa Chavez, who was Green Bay’s city attorney at the time.

Green Bay, through the CTCL grants, was provided access to consultants from the National Vote at Home Institute, the Elections Group, the Brennan Center for Justice, and other groups to help prepare for the election.

One outside consultant, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein of the National Vote at Home Institute, was particularly involved in planning efforts, according to Chavez’s report. He drew the ire of Gableman, Republican lawmakers, and conservative activists after the election.

“In at least one case, private employees played a concerning role in the administration of the presidential election,” Wimberger and August wrote in their memo.

Spitzer-Rubenstein made “recommendations to staff” about logistics, setup, and elections operations, according to Chavez’s report, though he “had no decision-making authority” and he “never assisted with any matters involving actual ballots.”

Who can work on elections? Wording is ‘nebulous’

Ahead of the vote on the second proposal, clerks across the state have raised concerns that the measure could prohibit assistance they have come to expect during elections.

Oconomowoc City Clerk Diane Coenen questioned whether the measure would ban city Department of Public Works officials from moving election equipment to polling sites, and Trueblood wondered if it would also prohibit private vendors from printing ballots.

“Am I going to be able to continue?” Trueblood said. “Am I going to have to send ballots to goodness knows where to have them printed? I would rather have our chain of custody locally, where I send them the ballots and I have one person deliver them to my office.”

Confronted with clerks’ concerns, Wimberger said that if they’re worried about whether a person is eligible to do an election-related task, they can just tell them they’re “hereby designated” to do that task.

“You just don’t want people collecting ballots that are not even monitored or are completely disconnected from the clerk who’s supposed to be managing all this,” he said. But, he added, “if you’re working at the clerk’s direction, that certainly means you’ve been designated to do the thing that you’re doing.”

But clerks can’t just designate anybody to assist with elections, because state law generally requires election officials to be residents of the county they’re working in, said Emily Lau, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School-based State Democracy Research Initiative.

That could rule out assistance from the many workers helping clerks with election-related tasks who live outside the county, or even the state. For example, the company Election Systems & Software helps code ballots for 19 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, but most of that work is done at the company’s headquarters in Nebraska, ES&S spokesperson Katina Granger said.

Wimberger suggested it was unrealistic to interpret the provision as banning outside help for all election-related activities.

“You could go down a rabbit hole forever on that,” he said. “I mean, you do use pens. So where’s the ink made?”

He added that a rule from the Wisconsin Elections Commission or an update to state law could rule out any potential disagreements based on when an election starts to be formally conducted.

“There’s going to be a distinction between election preparation and the conducting of the election,” he said. “And I would say that the conducting of the election happens when the polls open or handling ballots.”

But that distinction isn’t written into the constitutional amendment wording, and Wimberger acknowledged that “conducting the election” is “a nebulous term.”

“Things like that have to be nebulous in a constitutional amendment, because otherwise there’d be a statute,” he said. “Statutes are more specific, and rules are even more specific than statutes. So I don’t think it could have gotten pared down any more than that.”

Clerks search for clarity, but come up short

Seeking clarity on the provision’s potential impact, Coenen and other clerks have looked through the ballot questions, the proposed language that would become part of the state constitution, and the explanatory statement that state Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, wrote.

Kaul’s brief statement doesn’t specify what election-related tasks would fall under the amendment’s scope if it passes. State law defines and regulates “how clerks can designate individuals and carry out various tasks relating to elections,” Kaul said.

The statement adds that clerks have power under state law to designate people to perform election-related tasks. But Kaul cautions that should the Legislature change that law, rescinding clerks’ power to designate people to help with election tasks, the new constitutional provision “would bar clerks from designating individuals to assist with election-related tasks.” His statement doesn’t address what might then happen, and clerks say it doesn’t resolve all their questions.

“They’re just too vague for me to get behind them and support them,” Coenen said about the amendment proposals. “And I don’t want to remain neutral, because they’re too problematic to be neutral.”

Some clerks say the potential changes and legal issues that could arise if the amendments pass add more variables in an already busy election season.

“We’re trying to do our job. We’re trying to facilitate an election securely, fairly, and accurately,” Coenen said. “Our goal is to make sure that every person who wants to vote and is eligible to vote gets to vote. And then we have all this back and forth, back and forth. It’s very concerning and disheartening.”

When new election-related lawsuits or laws require changes in election administration, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission generally seeks to issue guidance telling clerks how to implement changes, Commissioner Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said.

If the proposal passes, Jacobs said, she expects the agency to create new guidance, but it’s unclear how it’ll be worded.

“The problem is that amendment doesn’t really give us a lot of direction, does it?” she said.

Guidance for clerks can be created only if a majority of the six commissioners — three Republicans and three Democrats — approve it. Otherwise, clerks must look to other sources for legal clarification.

Before election administration became hyper-politicized around the 2020 election, the commissioners agreed on many election administration matters, said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, the founding director of the university’s Elections Research Center.

Since then, it has been harder for the commissioners to reach a consensus on many issues, Burden said. Since 2022, they have deadlocked on whether to restrict online access to absentee ballots, rescind guidance allowing drop boxes, and reappoint Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election official.

“I don’t know whether, if these items pass, they’ll be able to put together a unified statement about interpreting all of this,” Burden said.

Elections Commission guidance has been challenged in courts, and judges have ordered the agency to rescind or issue new direction.

Between potential litigation and the unclear process ahead at the Elections Commission, the path ahead for clerks if the amendments pass could be murky as they prepare for the presidential election this fall, Burden said.

“Clerks will need to know what’s allowed and what’s not allowed,” he said. “They don’t want to be sued or have their plans disrupted.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org. Jack Kelly is a reporter for Wisconsin Watch based in Madison, Wisconsin. Contact Jack at jkelly@wisconsinwatch.org.

Critical federal election administration grant funding struggles through Congress

2024-03-25T10:00:00+00:00

Here at Votebeat, we spend a lot of time and energy providing accurate information about elections to the public, so here’s a hard truth: Elections don’t run on pixie dust. They take money and planning, and a lot of both.

No matter how many times election officials remind them, politicians still struggle to grasp this fact, especially Congress.

Most money for administering elections comes from state and local governments, which control most things about elections. But the work is becoming more complex and expensive, and not all local governments are able to keep up with the growing burden. Election officials have long begged for a predictable stream of federal funds to help cover rising election costs, but Congress has in recent years allocated very little. And now once again, those grant dollars were caught up in the uncertainty that surrounds messy appropriations negotiations as the nation lurches towards a shutdown.

What does that mean for election funding? Basically, that everyone advocating for it has to hold their breath.

The federal government has declared elections to be critical infrastructure, but the amount it allocates to states and territories through the U.S. Election Assistance Commission has shrunk over the past few years. In 2018, the figure was $380 million. In 2020, it was $425 million, plus another $400 million allocated as part of the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last fiscal year, it amounted to just $75 million, and a Senate version of the omnibus appropriations bill called for the same amount this year. Republicans wanted to reduce that to zero, Punchbowl News reported this month.

Text of the compromise legislation wasn’t available until around 3 a.m. Thursday, making it harder for state and local election officials to plan their budgets, with this year’s presidential election looming. The bill ultimately included $55 million for grants, which means even less money for elections than last year.

“Election offices need time to plan investments thoughtfully, and the erratic nature of federal funding has routinely limited its effectiveness,” Rachel Orey, the senior associate director of the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, said in an email.

Orey points out that elections cost at least $2 billion per year, according to an estimate by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. The Bipartisan Policy Center recommended that Congress allocate $400 million for elections this fiscal year.

The $55 million that’s now in the bill is just a fraction of that, but it’s better than nothing, especially coupled with election security grants available through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that reportedly will be available.

Offering federal grants, even small ones, still matters, said EAC Chairman Benjamin Hovland. States have applied such grants toward the cost of purchasing new voting systems and fulfilling other election-related needs, from voter education to security.

“I think it’s still an important signal that there are federal funds being made available,” he said, while acknowledging that “we hear all the time from election officials that consistent federal funding would make a big difference in their planning.” Election officials have real needs, including combating both cyber and physical threats and harassment, he said.

For the first time this year, the bill says the $55 million is “to be paid from the unobligated balances” in the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. That fund was originally created to provide public financing for presidential campaigns, but the money comes with restrictions for campaigns that accept it, and no candidate has done so since 2008, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unused. Many have suggested that Congress redirect the money, including the Bipartisan Policy Center, which in 2022 suggested using it to pay election costs.

After the final $55 million number became available Thursday, Hovland said that it means states “probably know they are getting $1 million … they can start planning to use that today or as soon as this bill passes.”

The EAC has a track record of disbursing the money quickly. Of course, when $55 million is divided among 50 U.S. states, plus territories, the numbers shrink quickly. Some states need legislative approval in order to accept the money, which can create an obstacle if a legislature isn’t in session this year or has already adjourned.

Legislatures themselves sometimes push election officials to spend it quickly, so they might buy what they can rather than wait and spend it most efficiently; Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina state elections board, confirmed that in 2020, some counties tried to use up grant funds faster by buying backup surge protectors and similar supplies.

Whatever money gets through this year, Orey believes election officials are likely to spend it on things such as increasing poll worker pay, hiring more temporary workers, combating bad information, and updating security.

These are, pretty much, things everyone wants election officials to do. So, Congress: It’s up to you.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Can a group of experts take the politics out of funding elections?

2024-03-04T12:00:00+00:00

We write to you this week with news of a promising new group of experts examining why “funding election systems is so difficult” in contrast with other government services, which don’t receive nearly the same pushback and hesitancy to commit regular funding.

Election funding (or, the lack thereof) is a critical problem in the United States, and one Votebeat talks about a lot. There have been similar efforts — like the Presidential Commission on Election Administration during the Obama administration, for example — but these have largely centered on best practices in elections rather than the foundational issue of resources.

This initiative is a collaboration between the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, led by Tammy Patrick — the chief executive officer for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.

Patrick pointed out that both institutes are named for politicians who “were well-known for their ability to get to the heart of the matter in a bipartisan way — by presenting a perspective that would be amenable and civil.” That seemed to lend itself to taking on election funding, which presents fewer obvious partisan roadblocks than voting policies such as vote by mail.

“For all of the challenges we have in the election administration field, so much of it comes back to the question of sufficient funding or the cadence of that funding,” said Patrick.

This, from a local elections official at the working group’s kick off event, explains it all: “We always joke around election equipment,” said Jamie Doss, the clerk in Saline County, Kansas. “If we could paint [election equipment] in Caterpillar yellow, and it be the same color as a motor grader…because most of our funding goes for roads.”

The working group includes names that have appeared before in this newsletter: Mitchell Brown, Auburn University; Paul Gronke and Paul Mason, Reed College; Kathleen Hale, Auburn University; Martha Kropf, University of North Carolina; Zach Mohr, University of Kansas; Rachel Orey and Matt Weil, Bipartisan Policy Center; and Charles Stewart, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In a phone call, Audrey Coleman, director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, said that the two host institutes see themselves as “the conduit for the conversation” between academics and local election officials. Local elections officials, she said, will be consulted throughout the process to ensure that the final product is reflective of their needs.

The working group’s inaugural event took place in February in Kansas at the Dole Institute, and kicked off with Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab in conversation with Douglas County, Kansas, Election Officer Jamie Shew. The following day honed in on research and case studies in election funding and resource allocation — truly an election nerd’s holiday.

In Patrick’s mind, the project will be a success if their final report outlines the varying models for funding, and establishes some understanding of which is most sustainable and effective. Surprisingly, there’s little understanding of the most effective funding models for elections, and not much clarity on which funding models are most common.

Kansas — many of whose elections officials spoke at or were present for the event — presents an interesting example: The state has no part in funding local elections. Outside of irregular grants, counties bear those costs. But, across the country, funding models differ wildly. Sometimes states and municipalities reimburse the county on a per-voter basis for costs of administering elections, sometimes one does but not the other. Sometimes candidate filing fees are applied towards the cost of administering elections, and sometimes no filing fees are charged.

Patrick would also like the report to dispel certain myths the public has about who funds elections — like, for example, that the federal government reimburses states for running the presidential election or that counties dedicate a large portion of their budgets to the administration of elections. A few years ago, Auburn University political scientists conducted a study of NAEO members to see what portion of the county budget elections took up. The number came to 0.54 percent.

“So, one half of one percent!” said Patrick. “That’s insane.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

The federal agency dedicated to elections is, once again, in turmoil ahead of the 2024 elections

2024-01-15T11:00:00+00:00

Some news: The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has fired its executive director, Steven Frid, who held the job for less than a year. Frid was the agency’s third executive director in as many years. The agency has also been without a permanent general counsel for nearly two years without even an interim counsel for a year — the temporary replacement left for a job at the Federal Emergency Management Agency last February.

The EAC has confirmed Frid’s departure. Sources with direct knowledge of the decision confirm he was fired.

The executive director and the general counsel represent the top two staff positions in the agency. That means the agency’s chief information security officer — who would otherwise be focused on crucial cybersecurity issues that are obviously relevant to 2024 — is now filling in as executive director. The agency is beginning a search for a different interim director while they look for a permanent replacement.

I’ve spent much of my career writing about how (and why) the EAC isn’t a particularly effective agency. Here are some of those headlines:

“How the Election Assistance Commission Came Not to Care So Much About Election Security.” (Nov. 2018)
“Federal Election Agency, Hungry for Funds, Now Pays for Officials to Get to Office.” (July 2019)
“How Voter-Fraud Hysteria and Partisan Bickering Ate American Election Oversight.” (July 2020)
“How Trump ally Cleta Mitchell won a seat on the EAC advisory board” (Nov. 2021)

That’s not to suggest that the EAC has been entirely ineffective. The agency, for example, efficiently distributed emergency funds during the pandemic and recently updated the (very out-of-date) standards for voting systems it maintains. But, repeatedly, apparent progress is derailed and the agency finds itself largely back where it was.

Four commissioners — two Republicans and two Democrats — are responsible for running the agency, which despite its small size clearly does important things. It is, some election administrators will tell you, the best shot the country has at sane election guidance from the federal government.

While many election administrators long ago reached the opinion that the EAC was never going to amount to an effective voice in elections, many still hold out hope that an agency they see as a crucial conduit to Congress and the White House will get its act together. I’ve had dozens of conversations with dozens of such people that go something like this: “Did you see that the EAC hired [insert name here]? They could do some good there.”

Inevitably, that person — a new project manager, a new technologist, a new executive director, a new attorney — leaves or is fired within two years.

This pattern of turnover for the executive director and general counsel began in 2019, when the pair of officials who’d held the roles since 2015 were not rehired as their contracts expired. Both were replaced in the summer of 2020 by permanent candidates. About a year-and-a-half later, both positions would be vacant yet again: Executive Director Mona Harrington left for CISA in January of 2022, and General Counsel Kevin Rayburn left for the postal service that February.

An interim general counsel filled the role until leaving for FEMA a year later, and it has been open since. An interim also held the executive director position until Frid was hired in January 2023. Then Frid lasted until late December.

So — as in 2020 — the EAC begins the 2024 federal election year without both an executive director and a general counsel.

Rather than being allowed to focus entirely on supporting local election administrators this year, the agency’s four commissioners will have to continue filling open positions. By law, the EAC will also have to convene an ad-hoc group of state elections administrators to recommend replacements. These folks, obviously, also have a lot to do this year.

On top of it, that committee has rarely been listened to by the EAC’s commissioners: since at least 2019, no person recommended by this committee has been chosen. No one I’ve spoken to who has served on this committee in the past expects it will be any different this year.

In the last eight years, several meetings about the EAC I have attended have really been about — whether this was the stated topic of discussion or not — how the agency can’t attract or keep staff. Past employee surveys and Office of Inspector General reports have, likewise, repeatedly noted high turnover and lack of staff satisfaction. Every single one of the current commissioners is on a holdover term, as congressional leadership has declined to formally renominate them or replace someone else when their terms expired. The entire agency, it seems, is suffering from hiring problems.

A recent OIG report said that while the elections community has growing expectations for the small agency, the “EAC has limited staff and a growing mandate, and conditions make this challenging to overcome.” The report indicates that salary caps at the agency and other internal limitations make it difficult to find qualified staff willing to take the jobs. And, so, any rare success the agency has achieved with its hires in recent years has been awkward to sustain.

So, unless the commissioners can pull off a miracle here — or at least engage the community they serve — that pattern is likely to continue.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

The most important storylines Votebeat is watching in 2024

2024-01-02T10:30:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Strap in, folks. It’s 2024. I hope you all enjoyed your holiday parties, because we are in it now.

I’ll cut straight to it: Things are looking a bit bleak, and it’s going to be a busy year.

Hand-counting has supplanted ending vote by mail as the Bad Idea of the Moment. The high rate of election worker turnover has not improved, and might actually be getting worse. And state legislatures continue to underfund election offices and pass legislation that makes already underpaid county workers have to work even harder. These, at least, are some of the things we’re thinking about as we figure out how to prioritize the thousands of voting stories we could write this year.

Let’s explore each:

Hand-counting

It confounds me that this idea still has such a grip on a large part of the Republican Party, but here we are. We wrote about it a lot last year, and we’re ready to write a lot about it this year, too. And we won’t even have to wait very long: In about three months, the local Republican party in Gillespie County, Texas, will hand-count its primary. And we anticipate another wave of advocacy on behalf of this terrible idea for November.

Turnover

Last year we watched even more election administrators make their way to the door, waving goodbye to the stress, low pay, and increasing harassment they report facing in huge numbers. That’s left us in a precarious place. In 2023, some counties across the country saw elections beset by avoidable error — often in places where the election administrator was relatively new. 2024 will place even more pressure on these brand-new county workers. We’ll be trying to assess the damage that’s already been done, while keeping track of the attempts to stem the tide.

Disappointing Lawmakers

State legislatures and Congress alike have been famously underfunding elections — despite having a lot of opinions about how they should work — for years. So, too, have they been passing laws that have adverse consequences, unintended or otherwise. We’ll be paying particular attention to how the voting bills passed in the wake of the 2020 election shake out for voters in their first presidential election since their passage. And we’ll keep track of any last minute attempts by lawmakers to issue one-time funding infusions, since we know they love to do that during election years.

Now, I’m going to turn it over to the rest of the folks at Votebeat, who will tell you what they’ll be keeping their eye on this year.

Jen Fifield, Arizona

Arizona enters 2024 in a precarious spot, with lingering challenges to both 2020 and 2022 elections still underway. How they play out could influence the 2024 election.

The way election-related indictments and lawsuits shake out over the course of the year could give voters some clarity, and maybe even some finality, by the time they head to the polls again in November.

By then, Attorney General Kris Mayes’ investigations of Cochise County supervisors and the 2020 fake electors will surely be over. Two Cochise supervisors’ refusal to certify their county’s 2022 election by the state deadline, along with the fake electors’ attempt here and in other states to overturn the 2020 election results, created uncertainty around those elections. By prosecuting those efforts, Mayes will make the consequences clear to voters, county supervisors, and activists seeking to undermine 2024′s results.

Of course, the rules for how elections are run may be clarified, too. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ new election procedures manual, which attempts to clarify rules on hand-counting ballots, voter intimidation, and many other aspects of elections, will be final — even if Republicans sue over them and the court has the final say on what is legal in the manual, and what isn’t. And pending lawsuits challenging how counties count mail ballots and whether unstaffed drop boxes are allowed will be decided — or, if not, status quo will apply for the 2024 election.

In the Legislature, there’s little optimism that the political stalemate between Republican lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs will crack. That means we’ll keep our eyes on the counties and the courts, instead.

Jen’s favorite story she wrote in 2023: Arizona voters were told the election went fine. Records show a county director saw glaring errors, cashed out, then fled.

Oralandar Brand-Williams, Michigan

Michigan lawmakers have spent the past year revamping Michigan’s voting laws in ways aimed at boosting voter access. In late November, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed 23 new election and democracy bills into law.

In 2024, Votebeat will be watching to see how the new laws work during a presidential election.

The new laws include a minimum of nine days of early in-person voting, pre-registration of 16-years-olds who become eligible to vote at age 18, and — in 2025 — automatic voter registration of individuals leaving prison after serving their sentences. Now, thousands of local election officials across the state have to successfully put the new laws into effect.

Will the new laws get more people out to the polls to take part in this country’s democracy? We’ll be watching to see if the new laws will indeed prompt more participation.

Also, I will be watching to see how clerks are able to handle the extra days of voting and whether they can recruit the additional poll workers they’ll need to do so. Michigan election officials have put out a call for more poll workers.

The Legislature could also have more election bills coming. Michigan voters will be seeing a lot of changes to the system this year, and we’ll be watching how it goes.

Oralandar’s favorite story she wrote in 2023: Some communities are kicking off Michigan’s historic early voting with this fall’s municipal elections

Carter Walker, Pennsylvania

Like many states, Pennsylvania will be facing a deficit next year — in knowledge. We’re still gathering data, but it looks as if the state’s local election directors will collectively have 200 years less experience for this November’s election than they did at the start of 2020. We’ll be watching to see what that means for voters.

Many counties have lost decades of experience. Take Lebanon County, where the director and deputy administering the 2019 municipal election had 27 years of experience combined, compared to less than four years combined experience today. Other counties, such as Greene — which is on its sixth director since 2020 — have cycled through a host of election officials.

In 2022, Luzerne County showed us the problems election director turnover can cause. The constant churn of personnel led to a ballot paper shortage during the midterm election that brought national attention to the county. Pennsylvania saw more ballot errors this year than in any election year since no-excuse mail ballot voting went into effect. This loss of experience is probably the largest and most unappreciated election challenge facing the state this year.

So I’ll be paying attention, examining whether new directors can gain enough experience before the November election and whether the Department of State’s training programs are sufficient.

Carter’s favorite story he wrote in 2023: Why election problems continue to plague this northeast Pa. county

Natalia Contreras, Texas

A big chunk of my time in 2023 was spent reporting on a push by right-wing election conspiracy theorists to persuade Texas election officials to ditch electronic voting equipment and hand-count ballots instead. The topic was a point of contention among election officials this year, and it’s already having an impact on the planning of the March 2024 primary.

Counting ballots by hand has been widely proven to lead to errors, election lawsuits, and the potential disenfranchisement of voters. Nonetheless, fueled by election conspiracy theories, the GOP in one county — Gillespie, in the Texas Hill Country — will hand-count its primary election results without the help of the county’s elections department.

Although Republicans in Gillespie are the only ones making such a wholesale change, what happens there in March could be a powerful indicator of what’s to come for the remainder of 2024.

Will election skeptics be convinced this method isn’t reliable and put it to bed? Will it fuel calls for even more change in election legislation? How exactly will it impact voters’ trust in elections? We plan on being there to see how this plays out.

At least one other consequence of election conspiracy theories that I am keeping a close eye on in 2024 is the Texas withdrawal from ERIC, the multi-state coalition that helps states clean voter rolls and prevent voter fraud.

Natalia’s favorite story she wrote in 2023: Overlooked law requires election equipment that doesn’t exist, at a cost of $116 million

Carrie Levine, story editor

As always, I’ll spend 2024 trying to understand why some potentially damaging ideas — such as the hand-counting push — find traction around the country. Are such movements truly organic, or are there people promoting potentially disenfranchising methods for their own reasons?

Such questions will be increasingly important as Votebeat’s reporters cover the lead-up to a high-turnout, high-pressure presidential election, the first since 2020. Will democratic processes and customs hold? Will journalists be able to unravel the new conspiracy theories and false information that will certainly emerge?

Three years of turmoil over elections has pushed experienced election officials out of their jobs, forcing turnover at a critical time. It isn’t clear how that will affect 2024, but we’ll be watching.

Chad Lorenz, editor-in-chief

Votebeat’s mission is to help people understand our system of democracy so they can participate in strengthening it. Note that there’s a role for you in that mission, and we take that last part very seriously. Our journalism is designed with our readers in mind — not simply to inform them but give them information they can do something with: a prompt to participate in strengthening elections and voting, and the knowledge that they will need in order to do it.

As an editor, I often imagine the proverbial reader sitting at their desk finishing one of our articles and reacting to what they just learned. As I picture them, the reaction I would least want to see is a reader stroking their chin and murmuring, “Hmmm, how interesting.” I don’t want Votebeat readers passively musing that our journalism is interesting. I want them pounding a fist into their palm and huffing, “That sounds messed up!” or “There’s got to be a better way!” or “Yes, what a fantastic idea for making elections better!”

Whether you run elections for your county, or you make decisions about elections in your state, or you are working to improve voting for a nonprofit, or you are simply someone who cares about your ability to vote, Votebeat journalism is here not just to inspire your reaction but also your action.

One of my favorite kinds of messages in our newsroom’s chat system is when a reporter pings us to say that they just heard residents talk at a county board meeting about one of our stories — lately Cochise County, Arizona — and that those residents voiced their opinion to local officials about some major election issue we raised. Or when a reporter says that lawmakers referred to Votebeat reporting on the floor of the legislature, as has happened a few times this year in Texas.

That’s why in 2024, we aim to produce more journalism that you can use to do your part in strengthening our democracy. We have lots of ideas, but we would be more confident if we could hear it from you. Read on for more about that..

Lauren Aguirre, engagement editor

In 2024, I’m going to be keeping readers like you in mind.

Seriously.

We can’t know whether we’re achieving our mission if we’re not hearing from our readers — we want to know your questions, concerns, and thoughts about voting and elections. When you see reporters asking for you to reply to their newsletters, or you see us circulating surveys to gather different ideas or experiences from readers, it’s in earnest. We see every response, discuss many of them, and I often personally reach out to readers to continue the conversation.

We want to hear from you about how our reporting helps you, or answers your questions — it’s how we can gauge how well we’re serving our mission.

How has our reporting helped you understand our elections? Have you taken any actions after reading our work? What else should we look into and report about? Please tell us! You can reply to this email to share your experiences. And don’t forget to fill out our currently open survey gathering what you want to know about elections for 2024.

A Mississippi voting meltdown deserves more attention than it’s getting

2023-11-13T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

The 2023 off-cycle election has concluded and it was, on balance, a smooth success. Turnout was high where it was expected to be, and low where it was expected to be, and by and large, administrators were prepared. There was a scattering of snafus and incidents, most of which were resolved without further issue.

There was, as is often the case, a glaring exception to the untroubled proceedings: Hinds County, Mississippi.

Hinds County is home to Jackson, a predominantly Democratic and Black city, which has had more than its share of adversity shoveled its way in recent years. And throughout that county, precincts repeatedly ran out of ballots. Polls open at 7 a.m. and at least one precinct — McLeod Elementary in North Jackson — was out of ballots before 9 a.m. Ultimately eight others (out of a total of 110 voting precincts) would also run out of ballots. Lines were up to two hours long in some places, and some voters simply left altogether as the county responded by delivering small batches of more ballots throughout the day.

Sure, turnout was high. But it was expected to be. The state has been the setting of a surprisingly competitive gubernatorial race.

Still, initial returns do not suggest to me that Hinds County’s turnout in 2023 — around 65,000 votes cast for governor — was significantly higher than the 2019 election of the same type, where more than 70,000 votes were cast.

The early numbers make explanations by local officials seem at least incomplete.

In an interview with local station WLBT, Hinds County District 5 Election Commissioner Shirley Varando blamed “unexpectedly large turnout as the problem.” “We’re running ballots as we speak because we’re trying to make sure every voter gets a chance to come out and cast their ballot for the people of their choice,” she said.

“I believe that the secretary of state’s office and county elections office were simply not prepared for the overwhelming, amazing turnout we are seeing in Hinds County. We are not seeing any of these issues in any other precincts in any other counties, to this degree,” Jason McCarty, a member of the Hinds County Democratic Party Executive Committee, told CNN.

According to local station WAPT, “District 2 Election Commissioner RaToya McGee said there were enough ballots delivered for 70% of voters in each precinct. McGee said some poll managers didn’t pull out all of the ballots they were supplied before calling to ask for more.”

State law requires the counties to have ballots for 60 percent of total active voters, and gives local officials discretion over how they are distributed.

There are just more than 165,000 active voters in the county, which suggests — if McGee is right — that there should have been about 115,000 ballots to go around. Of course, stocking ballots is not a simple matter of distributing them equally across the county. It is far more complicated, and any election administrator could tell you so: Ballots must be apportioned by precincts and language, among other things. A whole number won’t tell you much, but no one is responding to my requests for a more detailed explanation.

We don’t yet know a lot about what happened in Hinds County on Tuesday, but Secretary of State Michael Watson offered 2020 redistricting as a factor in an interview with Mississippi Today. The new maps changed precinct lines and also split precincts in new ways.

“They might have 10 people at the precinct who get one ballot style, and then 50 who get another ballot,” Watson said. “I think in some cases, this got flipped, and they ended up with 10 of one type when they needed 50. We were getting calls throughout the day about problems in Hinds, and we then learned there were several lawsuits being prepared.”

If he’s right, that’s… not great. And it’s something thousands of other election administrators across the country get right, regardless of how the precinct lines move. We’ll see what shakes out in the end, but, whichever way you slice it, it’s a huge misstep (or rather, series of missteps) on the part of the Hinds County election commission — a five-person committee made up entirely of elected Democrats.

For their part, Watson and his office were quick to point out that the secretary of state has little control over the decision making of the counties in the state, and did not respond to an inquiry from Votebeat about its authority to respond to the failures now that they’ve occurred.

Now, let’s talk about why Mississippi elections don’t get as much attention as other states, even though local reporters have knocked themselves out covering issues there. News reports and public acknowledgement of the ballot shortages began to trickle out Tuesday afternoon, though the problems had started several hours earlier. If this were a county in a swingier state than Mississippi, we all would have known about it immediately and Hinds County would have been forced to offer a more fulsome explanation.

It took me the better part of a day to find one person from a national advocacy organization that had been on the ground in Jackson. Ultimately, through multiple layers of contacts and one accident, I found two. Had it been any similarly-sized county in any swing state, I bet it would have taken a matter of minutes to find contact information for a half-dozen.

Not so in Mississippi.

Debbie Pantenburg, who manages communications for the League of Women Voters Mississippi, said that she can “only surmise” the votes lost as voters left the lines in Hinds County “likely would not have made a bit of difference in the state elections,” though they may have had an effect on local races.*

“[Hinds County] is one of the most underrepresented in the history of the state, and this just contributes to their voter fatigue,” she said. “Someone didn’t do their jobs.”

Paloma Wu — deputy director of impact litigation at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which represented Mississippi Votes in one of the lawsuits to keep polls open in the county — acknowledged that reaction has been “quieter than you would expect for such a big failure.”

She agrees it’s because Hinds County isn’t competitive.

Will it ever be thus? Even though voting rights and access to the ballot box is the issue du jour, there are clearly still big problems in this country that aren’t investigated with the thoroughness they deserve because the voters affected by them do not live in a politically critical place.

Maybe it’s time we all looked hard at that.

Back Then

This isn’t the first time Hinds County has been short on ballots:

“The Hinds County Board of Supervisors asked county attorneys Monday to investigate the actions of Hinds County Election Commission Chairwoman Connie Cochran after she admitted to not ordering the number of ballots required by law for any of the past four countywide elections,” reported the Clarion Ledger on Nov. 19, 2014. Defending her actions, Cochran said she was “just trying to save the county money.”

Cochran left county office in 2016 after losing re-election.

New From Votebeat

From Votebeat Arizona: Two new Arizona laws would create regular checks on voter citizenship. Will a judge let them stand?

From Votebeat Arizona: Early closing times for some Maricopa County drop boxes frustrate last-minute voters

From Votebeat Pennsylvania: Voting machines in Northampton County printed ballots with errors in two judicial races

From Votebeat Pennsylvania: “Hectic from the get-go”: How a new polling place chief in Pennsylvania navigated his first election.

From Votebeat Michigan: Low turnout but smooth sailing for Michigan’s first foray into early voting

In Other Voting News

The Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed an effort to ban former President Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot under the 14th Amendment, which renders anyone who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office, ruling that political parties control which candidates are eligible for the primary ballot, but left open the possibility of a similar lawsuit succeeding in keeping him off the general election ballot, the Associated Press reported.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which works with election officials around the country to protect against physical and virtual threats to elections, said this year’s elections ran smoothly and they saw no major threats.
Election offices in five states — Georgia, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington — received suspicious mail including a powdery substance, some of which contained fentanyl, the Associated Press reported. The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the incidents “acts of terrorism” meant to undermine elections, and Georgia officials said they were providing the naloxone, a drug to reverse overdoses, to Fulton County elections officials as a precaution.
Former President Donald Trump is pressuring Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to impeach Meagan Wolfe, the nonpartisan head of elections in the state, something Vos has so far declined to do, the Journal Sentinel reported.
A judge upheld the results of the 2022 election in Harris County, Texas, ruling against a Republican candidate in a judicial race who said thousands of voters had been unable to cast ballots because of a ballot paper shortage affecting some polling places, the Houston Chronicle reported. The judge found Harris County election officials made many mistakes, but not enough to invalidate the election, and he also threw out all but one of 21 remaining election contests challenging the results.

Correction, Nov. 15: This article originally misspelled Debbie Pantenburg’s name.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Secure ballots or boondoggle? Arizona county tailors project to politically connected firm

2023-08-10T00:13:32+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Update, Aug. 8: Cochise County supervisors tabled the vote on the Authentix contract until a special meeting on Aug. 22.

As an Arizona county prepares to spend up to $1 million in state money to test anti-counterfeit features on ballots, it appears the project was tailored for one company in particular that has pushed the idea with the help of political allies in the state for more than two years.

The idea of adding unique features such as watermarks to ballots is gaining steam as a way to both protect against fraudulent ballots and improve voter confidence. But because the Cochise County pilot was crafted so specifically to describe Texas-based Authentix’s products, election technology experts say it unnecessarily limits the competition for the work while testing unnecessary and expensive products that might even make ballots unreadable to vote-counting machines.

Alex Gulotta, Arizona director of voter advocacy group All Voting is Local, called the venture a “boondoggle.”

“It’s designed specifically to benefit this particular company, and it’s solving a problem that does not exist,” Gulotta said. While Arizona’s failed GOP candidates and leaders have claimed thousands of fake ballots were inserted into Arizona’s 2020 and 2022 elections, courts have found no evidence of any.

But Cochise County supervisors are set to vote on Tuesday to contract with Authentix, as well as one other company that applied independently. The companies say they will test ballots with features such as watermarks, invisible ink and text, and unique dyes prior to the 2024 presidential election.

Texas-based Authentix specializes in authenticating other types of documents such as tax notes, particularly for foreign governments including Pakistan and Egypt, but appears to have never worked in elections. Still, the firm joined forces with former state Rep. Mark Finchem in 2021, who lost his 2022 bid for secretary of state, to convince state lawmakers across the U.S. to make their products mandatory in ballots.

Finchem has acknowledged a connection to Authentix but revealed few details, telling the Washington Post in 2022 just that he was connected to the company through “somebody who knew somebody.” The connection appears more direct than that. Votebeat found that one of Authentix’s founders, Olaf Halvorssen, was listed in 2021 as a team member of Finchem’s Idaho-based energy nonprofit, Clean Power Technologies, according to the nonprofit’s now-defunct website.

Authentix did not respond to two calls requesting comment or an email with specific questions. Upon visiting Authentix’s lab in an industrial office park in Addison, Texas — a suburb immediately north of Dallas — a Votebeat reporter was told to consult the company’s website. The company told the Post in 2022 that it did not have current connections to Finchem, who may run for state Senate.

Neither Halvorssen nor Finchem responded to requests for comments.

Finchem’s close friend, Cochise County Recorder David Stevens, will be overseeing the project. He’s helped Finchem promote the idea from the start, by offering a county ballot for use in demonstrations and attending meetings.

Stevens, who also didn’t respond to requests for comment, was the only recorder in the state to apply for the state money, even though all counties were eligible. That may be because the grant was written in a way that allowed only county recorders, not elections directors, to apply, even though in Arizona elections directors typically order and design ballots.

Authentix’s lab in Addison, Texas. The company is set to contract with Cochise County as part of a pilot project testing secure features on ballots.

“Glitter and holograms”

Cochise, a mostly-rural and heavily-Republican county in the southeast corner of the state, appears poised to keep experimenting with election procedures after a tumultuous November in which the county supervisors initially refused to certify the county’s election, and tried to illegally hand count all ballots as part of a post-election audit. Both efforts failed after courts ruled against the supervisors.

Stevens is just now putting the contract with Authentix, along with a contract with election vendor ProVoteSolutions, up for supervisors’ approval, even though the initial deadline for the state grant was in May. The Arizona Department of Administration extended that deadline to September 30 in a letter sent to the county on Thursday.

Authentix and ProVoteSolutions applied for the grant separately and did not coordinate their bids, but Stevens is proposing to hire both of them, according to Tuesday’s meeting agenda.

While the two Republicans on the three-member board are generally supportive of Stevens’ initiatives, meaning the project is likely to move forward, Republican Supervisor Tom Crosby said in an interview last week he doesn’t believe this is the way to make for more secure elections, in part because it doesn’t address his concerns with the lack of tracking of mail-in ballots.

“These ballots, with all their glitter and holograms, we are all going to feel safe, but it does nothing but prevent counterfeit ballots,” Crosby said, adding, “We think. Assuming that some dirty dog isn’t selling ballot paper where they shouldn’t be.”

As GOP leaders in Arizona advocate for laws that would limit all voting systems to be produced by U.S. companies with U.S.-made parts, Votebeat found that Authentix does much of its work with foreign governments and relies heavily on a contract with state-owned company Saudi Aramco, and it’s unclear whether it would get its paper and produce its products in the United States.

Republican Supervisor Peggy Judd said she hadn’t looked into Authentix but said she would only have a problem with the company if they were “affiliated with the mob or China.” Told about Authentix’s background, including its work for Saudi Aramco, Judd said she didn’t have any concerns.

Pilot tailored to Authentix

Stevens had few rules to follow for how to run the pilot, which the Legislature created last year.

The state grant simply directed recorders to test out different ways to make ballots more secure, and it couldn’t be in a way that would reveal the identity of an individual voter.

But Finchem had written a detailed roadmap for Stevens to follow.

Finchem started researching ballot security in late 2020, when “there were rumors circulating that somehow ballots had been secretly watermarked,” according to an Oct. 2021 fundraising email he sent out to supporters. Finchem acknowledged that the rumors of watermarked ballots were false, then said, “But it got me to thinking, what if they could be?”

He said that led him to being introduced to an Authentix executive, who said in the fundraising letter that’s when Authentix started to produce new technology for ballots.

In March 2021, Authentix and Finchem made their first big secure-ballot pitch to Arizona lawmakers. Finchem sent out an invitation to state lawmakers to attend a presentation by Authentix about “ballot fraud countermeasures,” according to a copy of the invitation obtained by Votebeat. Stevens replied to the invitation with a “YES”— he would be attending. The presentation took place in the basement of the state Capitol, and Stevens provided a Cochise County ballot for the demonstration, according to the invitation.

In October 2021, Finchem organized a “Ballot Integrity Summit” at Authentix’s office in Addison, Texas, trying to convince visiting state lawmakers to make Authentix’s features mandatory. Stevens, along with state Rep. Leo Biasiucci, attended. The Washington Post subsequently found nearly identical bills describing Authentix’s products in 2022 in four states, including Arizona.

Finchem proposed the initial Arizona bill on the topic in 2021, and another lawmaker picked it up in 2022. The bills, which both failed, would have required the state to use a specific list of 19 security features on ballots — features that closely mirror the products Authentix offers.

Stevens took the first 13 security features on that list and published them verbatim in his request for proposals for the pilot program, asking contractors to explain if they could provide the service.

The requests are very specific. For example, the request calls for “two-color rainbow print invisible ultraviolet numismatic designs with fine line security relief design that follows the primary images’ design exactly and with a minimum line weight of 0.0424 millimeters.”

The vast majority of these security products are not currently used on ballots in the U.S. — some of them for good reason. “Secure holographic foil,” for example, may be reflective, which could cause the ballots to be unreadable by ballot tabulators. Stevens also requested bar codes, which, if they are unique to individual voters, could make the voters’ individual ballots identifiable.

Authentix answered the specific requests from Stevens with near-verbatim wording.

When asked for “secure holographic foil” with “branded overprint of any hologram,” for example, the company responded that it provides “highly secure holographic foil” with “branded overprint of the hologram.” When asked for “unique, controlled-supply watermarked clearing bank specification 1 security paper,” Authentix said it could provide “genuine watermark cbs1 security paper that cannot be obtained by any other company/individual.” Authentix did not say how or from where it would procure the paper that no one else could.

ProVoteSolutions, which prints election materials for several California counties, also had responses to the requests, although the company sometimes appeared to try to explain why the requests didn’t really make sense for U.S. elections. That type of security paper, they wrote, was generally created for a European market. And while it could do a background image that covers 75% of the ballot, “we have found that invisible ink could affect the black timing marks and OCR sections of a ballot.”

Some of the specifics apply more to Authentix’s current market: authenticating tax notes for foreign governments, which sometimes involves using encrypted bar codes, according to Authentix’s website.

Authentix did not list any recent election-related experience in the information it provided to Cochise County.

Of the five projects the company listed, three were contracts to produce tax stamps for foreign governments — Pakistan, Egypt, and Ghana. The other two were secure document and medical prescription programs for unnamed clients.

As of 2016, one of the company’s largest contracts was tagging overseas fuel for state-owned Saudi Aramco, a contract that was critical to the company’s valuation, some of the company shareholders told a court in 2020. Authentix also has a team based in China.

Ann English, Cochise County’s lone Democratic supervisor, said she is not sure why Stevens is trying to work with companies “that print for banks, not ballots.”

English called the pilot project “another solution looking for a problem that does not exist.”

“The whole process of secure paper has escalated to the point of ridiculousness,” she said. “If a person tries to vote twice, the system will not allow it. End of story.”

Cochise County resident Ali Morse said she is concerned by the connections between Authentix and Finchem, and Finchem and Stevens, especially since “there’s a boatload of money to be made” if Arizona counties start using secure features on ballots.

She also thinks it’s all a little much.

“The sophisticated security features that Authentix advertises are unwarranted overkill for our ballots that have no history of being fraudulent,” she said.

Morse reached out to other county recorders in the state to see why they didn’t participate in the pilot program. Emails she provided to Votebeat show many recorders told her ballot ordering is the job of the elections director.

“Tremendous scrutiny”

After the 2020 election, Finchem claimed without evidence that 35,000 fake ballots were cast in Pima County. Shortly after that, Finchem started working with Authentix on what he said was a solution to the fake ballots, even though he provided no evidence that fake ballots existed.

David Levine, senior elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, says this may be an example of the “cottage industry” that spreads the stolen election narrative, and then profits from it.

“I think this entire situation deserves tremendous scrutiny,” Levine said.

Still, separate from the Arizona pilot, election officials, state lawmakers and vendors across the country are exploring ways to increase the security of ballots, recognizing that some voters would feel more confident if they had a way to authenticate individual ballots. ES&S, for example, is evaluating paper technologies and “plan to make [those services] available at a future date,” company spokesperson Katina Granger said.

California has had a law requiring watermarks for decades. Georgia started putting a security feature in ballots in 2019 and made it a requirement in 2021, and Tennessee also enacted a new law requiring watermarks on all ballots that year.

But those states all just use one secure feature – in California and Tennessee, it’s watermarks, and in Georgia, it’s something baked into the paper that a tabulation machine or special wand can identify. In contrast, Cochise’s pilot is considering more than a dozen different security features.

Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, said the smart way to go about it is to work with the election vendors in the state and with counties to see what’s practical and cost-effective.

Sterling said that the numerous products in Arizona’s pilot seem like “overkill” and said officials in the state should be working with machine manufacturers or they are just “shooting blind.”

The rules vary on how the secure features in these states are verified when ballots are returned, but it’s generally left up to local clerks.

While checking for watermarks is relatively easy, as they are visible to the human eye or with special lights, it’s unclear how local election officials would be able to check the authenticity of the proposed features in Arizona, which is crucial for this idea to work, according to the OSET Institute, an election technology nonprofit.

The Arizona pilot will test if certain features can work in ballot tabulators, but the manufacturer of Cochise County’s voting machines, ES&S will not be helping the county with the testing, Granger said.

Along with planning to hire Authentix and ProVoteSolutions, Stevens has already ordered ballots and a watermarking device, called a dandy roll, from Runbeck Election Services. He paid Runbeck $187,500 for the supplies in January, according to a receipt obtained by Votebeat, and asked the state for reimbursement for the items.

Authentix’s proposal has a cost of about $2.75 a ballot, about double the cost of ProVoteSolutions’ ballots, at $1.30 to $1.40 each.

Levine said that in the ideal situation, the requirements for companies wouldn’t be so specific, to enable more competitors, which makes the products and the prices better.

“What we have here is a barrier to the competition that is becoming a barrier to improve elections.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

How Pa. counties spent the first-ever election grants from the state — and why they want more

2023-07-28T08:50:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Pennsylvania counties that benefitted from $45 million in state funding to help cover election costs say they are happy with the investment and plan to apply for a new round of grants beginning next month.

In the lead-up to last year’s November election, counties spent much of their share on expenses such as mail ballot sorting machines, rental trucks to transport voting equipment, and poll worker pay, according to new data from the Department of Community and Economic Development.

The money was made available through a bipartisan law known as Act 88, which represented one of the state’s most significant investments in election administration ever, and counties are looking forward to reapplying for the grants when applications open up in August.

Still, at least two counties say they will again decline to apply because of the strings that are attached to the grants. That includes a requirement that counties continuously count mail ballots beginning on Election Day and not stop until the task is finished.

The strings — and the dollars — are the product of a deal last July between the then-Republican-controlled state Legislature and former Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to provide election dollars to counties in exchange for a ban on outside grants for election costs.

“Absolutely it was useful,” said Matthew Repasky, elections director in Columbia County, which received roughly $200,000 and spent about a third of the money on the secure transportation, storage, and maintenance of voting equipment. Repasky looked at his budget from the previous year and identified expenses that lined up with the program’s spending categories, saving county dollars.

Complete spending data is not yet available as counties are still working on reports for money spent during the May primary. But reports from the November 2022 midterm election, which Votebeat and Spotlight PA obtained from the state via a public records request, show counties spent roughly $20.6 million, primarily on staffing costs, as well as secure transportation and storage of election equipment.

Counties most commonly spent the funds on payments to poll workers, which accounted for $8.7 million, the reports showed. Staffing costs are typically one of the most expensive parts of a county’s election. While poll worker pay was the largest spending category for the grants, many of the expenses in other categories were also related to staffing costs, the reports show.

Some counties bought big ticket items, such as Luzerne’s $371,565 purchase of an Agilis Mail Ballot Sorting System. Many counties made large purchases in 2019 when the state shared some of the cost of upgrading voting machines, which was required by a legal settlement.

“There are a lot of costs that go into running an election,” said Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania.

Counties had until June 30 to spend the grants. Each county was eligible for a specific amount determined by the size of its voting population.

Philadelphia had the highest allocation, at $5.4 million, while rural Cameron County had the lowest, at slightly more than $15,000.

“It was useful to help cover the voting procedures that are now in place because of [no-excuse mail-in voting], with the additional mail-in ballot processes, printing, and postage,” Jason Mihal, election director in Greene County, said. “It does help a lot with that.”

Applications for the second round of funding will open next week.

Some counties opt out

Only four counties — Bradford, Crawford, Montour, and Susquehanna — did not take the grant money last year, with most telling the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time it was due to the continuous count requirement.

At least two will not be applying again, for the same reason.

“We don’t have the personnel to meet the count requirement,” said Ryan Craig, elections director of Montour County, a central Pennsylvania county with fewer than 12,000 registered voters. “We don’t even have enough [ballots] to justify continuously counting.”

Crawford County also won’t apply this year, Commissioners Eric Henry and Francis Weiderspahn said. The county prefers not to hire additional staff outside of the elections office to comply with the continuous count requirement, which they view as a security risk.

“Whenever the state has these ideas, we just wish that they would talk with the people that have to follow them,” Henry said. “We just wish they would come ask our opinion before they go change laws or make grants.”

Officials in Bradford and Susquehanna counties did not respond to questions about their plans.

Counties look ahead to next round

In 2020, Pennsylvania received $25 million in election grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which itself was heavily funded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The grants drew criticism from conservatives as having disproportionately gone to Democrat-heavy counties — although all 67 were invited to apply — leading to Act 88’s ban on outside election dollars.

As for the continuous counting requirement, many counties had been effectively engaged in this practice since Pennsylvania’s no-excuse mail-in balloting law went into effect, and the requirement doesn’t seem to have posed a significant challenge to most of them.

“That was something we were already doing,” Repasky said. “So that was not a burdensome thing.”

But, “just because they made it work doesn’t mean it’s the best way to run the election either,” Schaefer said.

The County Commissioners Association has called repeatedly for the state to pass a law allowing pre-canvassing of mail-in ballots before Election Day, as other states with robust mail voting systems do. Pre-canvassing would allow counties to begin the most laborious part of the process — opening envelopes and flattening ballots for scanning machines — earlier, allowing counties to report unofficial election results sooner.

Counties are now in the process of creating their 2024 budgets, and some are incorporating the state money into their plans.

Melanie Ostrander, election director in Washington County, said Act 88 was passed too late last year for such planning, so instead she used the dollars mostly to offset already-budgeted costs such as mail ballot printing and staff time.

But this year, she has specific plans for the funds. Anticipating the continuation of a national poll workers shortage, she wants to use the state money to increase poll worker pay.

“I’m hoping it continues as it was presented to us — every year we will be able to apply and receive around the same amount,” she said.

Schaefer had expressed concern earlier this month that the ongoing budget impasse in Harrisburg would affect when the state would disburse this year’s money to the counties. She said last week she had not yet received clarification from DCED on whether the money will be in place on Sept. 1, when counties will be expecting it.

A spokesperson from DCED told Votebeat and Spotlight PA Thursday that regardless of what happens with the budget impasse, money will be available in the Election Integrity Grant Program account on that date to fund eligible applications.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org

As pressure mounts to fix Pinal’s problems, elections director resigns

2023-06-28T22:35:00+00:00

Pinal County’s elections director abruptly resigned this week after facing harsh criticism from the county GOP. Her scathing resignation letter led many to compare her departure to those of other elections directors across the country who are facing harassment and resigning in droves as GOP leaders and residents confront them with false accusations about elections. But the circumstances here are far different.

There have been real problems in Pinal County’s elections, and Geraldine Roll was under the microscope to fix them fast.

The scrutiny Roll faced from the supervisors and the public since she took the position in December – especially, of late, from Republicans in the county who say they are concerned about election integrity – put immense pressure on Roll as she tried to quickly fix problems, develop new procedures, and hire a new team. At the same time, there were signs of growing tension with county supervisors.

The letter that circulated online Tuesday, which Roll signed “really, not respectfully,” shows that her breaking point had to do with how county leadership responded to recent public criticism she faced.

“When you no longer respect those you work for,” she told Leo Lew, the county manager, “it is time to leave. I have watched as you idly stood by when I was attacked. I cannot work for an individual who does not support me. The environment fostered by your team and the Board of Supervisors is toxic.”

Roll told Lew she had “no regrets” about quitting even though county officials were counting on her to quickly revamp the elections department and prepare for the approaching presidential election.

Now, with a year to go before the presidential primary, the county is faced with having to recruit a skilled elections director that can lead an entirely new staff equipped only with half-finished procedures drafted by Roll, and at the same time withstand the pressure from supervisors and the public to get it right.

Pinal County Democratic Party Chair Lisa Sanor said in a statement Wednesday she was disheartened by Roll’s departure and “concerned about the possible ramifications this has for all voters in Pinal County.”

Longtime Apache Junction resident Kelley Kimble said she’s also concerned about the future of the county’s elections, because she wants them done right and wants people to trust them, but she’s worried about who the supervisors are listening to when they make decisions about how to move forward.

“I guess I’m cautiously optimistic the county will hire somebody who has the right background and the determination to fix the errors and do things right,” she said.

Roll was the fourth elections director in Pinal in less than four years. That high turnover, along with a failure to grow and bolster the elections department as the county has grown, caused some of the problems the county’s elections have seen — including ballot shortages and printing errors in the primary and ballot counting errors in the general election. The county, located just southeast of the Phoenix metro area, has doubled in size in the last 20 years to around half a million residents.

Last week, Pinal County Republican Committee leaders began calling for the supervisors to consider replacing Roll because they disagreed with a few of her recent decisions, according to emails obtained by Votebeat through a records request. That included a decision this month to send back GPS devices the county had leased to track election equipment in the general election, without a replacement plan. GOP leaders say they saw this as something that might put election security at risk, even though Roll later explained she planned to get new tracking devices by 2024.

After quitting, Roll told the local newspaper Pinal Central that she did nothing wrong. She told the paper that she was a longtime Republican who only recently switched parties because she “can’t be associated with these people. They’re nuts.”

Attempts to reach Roll were unsuccessful.

While Supervisors Chairman Jeff Serdy told Votebeat in an interview Tuesday afternoon that the supervisors did not ask Roll to resign, the supervisors publicly questioned Roll about the GPS decision at a meeting last Wednesday, silence filling the room after Roll told them she had already returned the devices without them knowing. Roll wrote in her resignation letter that she felt the supervisors were attempting to politicize elections.

“You relegate impartiality, common sense and dedicated work to irrational, extremist political party views and rhetoric,” she wrote. “It is a far reach to see how you will deliver clean elections when you bend to a faction of the Republican party.”

In response to Roll’s resignation, Lew thanked her for her service during challenging times as she tried to make improvements to the elections department. But he also said he “disagreed with her assessment” on how she was treated by him and others.

The county’s Republican-led Board of Supervisors currently splits election oversight with Republican County Recorder Dana Lewis, but have since March been talking about moving elections under the recorder, while maintaining some duties they are required to under state law. After the conflict began last week, that conversation was fast-tracked, and the supervisors may discuss the change at a meeting next Wednesday.

Lewis, then, would be the one tasked with hiring a new elections director, hiring for a long-vacant deputy elections director job, and ensuring that better written procedures exist before 2024.

Top county Republicans seem supportive of this idea. Belinda Rodriguez, chair of the Pinal County Republican Committee, appeared to be talking about Lewis last week when telling the supervisors in a June 21 email that they have someone with “years of experience, knowledge and the skills to lead us through a successful election.” Lewis had years of experience in both elections and recording before the supervisors appointed her as recorder last summer.

Rodriguez wrote in the letter to the supervisors that she was sure Roll, who was a county attorney prior to being chosen as elections director, was a great lawyer but she had “some reservations that her knowledge and skills can lead us to a successful election without its integrity being compromised or challenged.”

“I am concerned that we are heading towards another botched election,” she wrote.

While supervisors have previously said they were confident in Roll’s abilities, her choice to move forward without their opinion on certain matters recently appears to have ruffled some feathers.

Those issues include the GPS debacle, but also Roll’s decision at the end of May to conduct a trial hand count of ballots without public or GOP party participation.

A few supervisors, including Jeffrey McClure, had raised the idea of a trial hand count of ballots to show the public what it would take to count ballots by hand instead of machine, after continued calls for this from GOP residents. Roll then started the trial hand count using her staff, without inviting the public, which came as a surprise to McClure a few days later when he found out it was already happening. Rodriguez told supervisors in her letter that she was only asked to recruit volunteers for the trial on the morning it was starting.

The trial was then put on pause, with a county spokesperson saying that the county thought it would be best to work with other counties and the state to come up with the best method. It’s unclear what county officials have in mind and neither the supervisors nor the spokesperson would clarify further.

Rodriguez told supervisors last Wednesday she was then frustrated to hear, the day before, that Roll wanted to cancel the county’s contract for the GPS devices. Supervisors were discussing, at that meeting, an item to cancel the GPS devices. That’s when Roll told them she had already sent them back. Roll explained she was trying to clean up after former elections director Virginia Ross, who the county attorney’s office says entered into the contract in violation of the county’s procurement process and without having it approved by the county attorney’s office. The county attorney’s office was working with Roll on amending the contract before this decision was made, but it’s unclear if the county manager knew, and the supervisors were not kept in the loop.

The devices didn’t work well in November, Roll said, because there was no way to affix them to ballot boxes, and she needed to send the devices back by a deadline earlier this month in order to end the contract.

Despite Roll’s promise she was going to find a replacement, Rodriguez and other residents said her decision didn’t sit well with them.

“Why are we taking a step backwards at a time when the county should be providing processes and systems to give more reassurance to our voters that the integrity of our elections is not compromised?” Rodriguez told the board last Wednesday.

On Monday, supervisors Serdy and McClure met with Lewis, her deputy recorder, and representatives of both county parties to talk about how to move elections forward, and Roll was not present.

“It was suggested that (elections) be put under the Recorder’s Office to provide oversight by someone who has years of experience in elections processes and procedures. We cannot afford another mishap at election time,” according to a summary of the meeting a GOP party representative sent to a county supervisor.

Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh wrote in an email sent to Votebeat Wednesday that he felt Roll was “unfairly vilified” when the county attorney’s office had been involved in the GPS contract discussions, “and nobody familiar with the agreement came to her defense.”

Roll wrote in her resignation letter that, over months, she had been subject to “ridicule, disrespect, intimidation and attacks on my reputation and ethics.”

Sanor, the Democratic Party Chair, wrote in her statement that Roll’s accusations of bullying and intimidation need to be investigated.

“Challenges can become opportunities, but it requires action, investigation and importantly decisions that are not driven by the hysteria of any political party,” Sanor wrote.

Serdy said in an interview that he was surprised by Roll’s message, because the board was supportive overall of the changes she was making to elections, and the board is just trying to provide more oversight and encourage changes to improve elections. He said that it’s understandable if Roll wasn’t used to public criticism and pressure, after working behind the scenes in the county attorney’s office prior to this.

“Lewis is used to fielding questions, and Roll, I don’t think was used to that,” he said.

Cavanaugh, though, wrote that Roll’s message “may be instructive for the board.”

“Clearly written in anger when hard truths are told, Roll ripped off the Band-Aid. We need to deal with what was underneath.”

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

No rules for Maricopa as it replaces faulty ballot printers, spends $8 million

2023-06-05T12:18:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

After relying on retail-grade printers to print hundreds of thousands of ballots on the spot and then experiencing a countywide Election Day breakdown, Maricopa County is planning on spending millions to buy much larger, high-performance printers for each of its 2024 polling places.

To replace its faulty $300 OKI printers, Elections Director Scott Jarrett has chosen a new, $7,000 model of Lexmark printer the county has previously used at some polling places. It’s an expensive choice given the county’s size: With software and supplies, the grand total comes to $8.3 million.

County supervisors last week set aside $9 million to buy the new Lexmarks when tentatively approving next fiscal year’s budget, which begins July 1. Other than the budget approval, the county supervisors will not directly vote on the decision or the purchase. It isn’t subject to a competitive bidding or public process because the county has chosen to update its existing contract with its current equipment supplier, Runbeck Election Services, instead of approving a new one, according to elections department spokesperson Matt Roberts.

Maricopa County Supervisor Chairman Bill Gates said county officials are taking a holistic look at 2022’s ballot printer problem to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“I’m confident we will make the right decision and there will have been the appropriate amount of time and study put into it,” Gates said.

As the county invests in an attempt to avoid future problems, election technology experts say that seeing such a large and sophisticated county experience major technological problems on Election Day amplified the need for more regulations and oversight of printers and other ancillary election equipment.

Ballot printers were “seen as a peripheral thing,” said Pam Smith, CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit which advocates for security in election technology. “But now there is more realization that this could actually have an impact on voters.”

No federal or state laws regulate which printers Arizona counties use to print ballots-on-demand for voters, or how the printers are tested.

Requiring ballot printers to be certified in Arizona, as other election equipment such as ballot tabulators are, would set standards for the printers and the testing of printers that might help prevent future problems, Smith said. Verified Voting, in a guide published last month, recommended that election officials set up rigorous pre-election testing focused on catching ballot printing errors prior to the 2024 election.

“If that technology is going to intersect with a voter at some point, and it has the impact on their ability to effectively cast a ballot … then you should probably test it, right?” Smith said.

Genya Coulter, a senior election analyst for the election technology and security nonprofit OSET Institute, is advocating for federal guidelines for ballot-on-demand printers.

As of now, ballot printers aren’t mentioned in the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s guidelines for voting systems, which mainly includes the technology used to cast a vote, such as ballot tabulators and their software, ballot marking devices, and accessible voting machines. But the commission is studying adding other secondary equipment to the guidelines. These are voluntary guidelines, but some states, including Arizona, require voting systems to meet them to be certified by the state.

The nonprofit Center for Internet Security has also taken notice of the lack of standards for testing this secondary category of election technology — technology other than that used to cast, scan, or tabulate a ballot, said Jared Dearing, the organization’s senior director of elections best practices. Starting this fall, the group will offer a program to help election officials evaluate the security, accessibility, and usability of voter registration systems, voter check-in systems, and election night reporting systems. The plan is to add ballot-on-demand printers within the next two years, Dearing said.

“While non-voting systems have traditionally been seen as secondary to voting equipment, they are tremendously important to the successful administration of any election,” Dearing said.

The lack of regulations meant Maricopa County’s election officials had no guidelines when they retrofitted the OKI printers in 2020. The county had previously used those retail-grade printers, such as you might find at an Office Depot, to print ballot envelopes during early voting. When the county needed more printers, the OKIs were repurposed to print ballots on Election Day.

Those printers, though, weren’t equipped to print high-quality double-sided ballots on the thick and long cardstock used in November 2022, and print quality suffered, causing tabulators to reject ballots throughout the day in one-third of polling places. About 17,000 ballots that couldn’t be tabulated at polling places were eventually able to be tabulated by larger ballot tabulators at the county’s central elections center.

Maricopa County tested its printers before they were used, and had successfully used them in the 2020 election cycle and 2022 primary, but an independent review of what happened found that better testing, to simulate their heavy, intermittent use on Election Day, may have identified that they would fail when presented with a longer and thicker ballot in November.

Regulations fail to keep up with technology

Last year was only the second federal election cycle that the enormous county, with 250,000 in-person Election Day voters, tried to print and tabulate ballots on the spot.

In 2020, the county switched to an all “vote center” model, where voters can vote at any polling place instead of just the one in their precinct. That model requires counties to have an electronic voter check-in system and ballot printers at polling places so they can print on demand the correct style of ballot for each specific voter’s precinct. Even a voter from one neighborhood over might have different candidates on their ballot than a voter who lives next door to the polling place.

Maricopa County is one of the only large counties in the country that does it this way on Election Day, with most other large counties in states without all-mail elections either pre-printing ballots, tabulating them back at their central elections center, or both, according to a Votebeat analysis of information from Verified Voting and the National Conference of State Legislatures.

This on-the-spot process raises the stakes for technology to work correctly. It’s becoming more common across the country, as a growing number of places switch to a vote center model that’s intended to be more convenient for voters, less expensive, and more efficient for administrators.

That means the use of ballot-on-demand systems and electronic voter check-in systems, called e-poll books, is growing, while mostly remaining unregulated.

California requires counties to certify their ballot printers as part of their elections system, but it’s unclear if any other states do. Adding printers to the certification requirement would help counties by providing an approved equipment list as a starting point, Smith said.

Several California counties, in their requests for proposals for election equipment, outline specifically what the printer will need to be able to handle. A 2019 Orange County RFP, for example, asked companies to describe how their printers would hold up when used by more than 2,000 voters a day for 10 days.

“That would require some stress testing,” Smith said.

In Arizona, the Elections Procedures Manual, which has the force of law, requires counties that use ballot-on-demand printers to include ballots printed by the printers in the pre-election logic and accuracy test conducted by the secretary of state’s office, and requires general testing of the printers before each election, but the manual doesn’t offer specifics. The rest is up to the county.

Maricopa County isn’t the only place having ballot printing problems. A review by the OSET Institute this year, spurred by Maricopa County’s problems, found 80 instances of ballot printing errors across the country between 2020 and 2022, according to Coulter, who presented her findings at an election security conference earlier this year.

Coulter said that adding printers to the list of equipment that needs to be certified in each state ensures not only that the printer will work but that it will be safe from any potential tampering.

Maricopa County doesn’t have many printer choices

In Maricopa County, each Lexmark printer will come with software and supplies, with the package for each totaling $13,000. The county already has 165 Lexmark printers and will need 640 more, enough to have two or three at each of the about 250 polling places planned for 2024, Jarrett said.

If the county wasn’t updating its Runbeck contract, a purchase of this size would typically go through a public procurement process, required in the county for any purchase over $100,000.

The original Runbeck contract didn’t go out to bid in Maricopa County, either, because the county adopted a Pinal County contract and then modified it to meet its needs, Roberts said.

Even if the county did go out to bid for the printers, Runbeck CEO Jeff Ellington said he doesn’t believe there would be many companies competitive with Runbeck, given its location in Phoenix and size.

There aren’t many options for ballot printers, generally, Ellington said, but especially when ballots are double-sided and as long and thick as Maricopa County’s ballots, at 20 inches and 100-pound weight in November.

In 2024, the county might need an even longer, 22-inch ballot, given the expected number of contests, according to Jarrett, the county’s election director.

Hardly any printers can accurately print on both sizes of ballots up to 22 inches long, Ellington said. Printing ballots requires a precision not needed for other documents, because the ballot image has to be perfectly aligned on the paper and the toner has to be dark enough for the tabulator to accept them, Ellington said

In a laser printer like the OKIs the county was using, the printer needs to heat up the page enough for toner — powder that adheres to the paper to create the image — to stick properly, and to be dark. In November, the ballots didn’t get hot enough and the toner was too light for the tabulators.

Runbeck does comprehensive testing on new printers, printing thousands of ballots on different paper types, before it even offers them to customers. Runbeck did this for the OKIs that Maricopa County was using, and for the new Lexmarks, Ellington said.

Maricopa County has also just completed its own testing of the Lexmark, after borrowing one from Runbeck.

Ellington said he thinks the county is making the right choice in upgrading to the Lexmarks, especially given the turnout and long ballot expected in 2024.

“Next year has got to go really smoothly,” he said.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Politicians know elections require steady cash, but they still aren’t providing it

2023-05-22T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

Hi, y’all,

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: one-time influxes of cash are no way to fund the ongoing needs of elections. That doesn’t roll off the tongue, sure, but it has the advantage of being true.

The Arizona secretary of state’s office just handed us a fantastic example of this reality. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes requested in ongoing funding to better support counties as they administer elections — something Votebeat Arizona reporter Jen Fifield’s coverage shows his office desperately needs to do more of.

You can tell where I’m going with this: They didn’t get the money.

The Arizona Republicans probably don’t want to hear this, but somehow, they’re following clearly in the footsteps of national Democrats, who have also resisted calls to create a predictable funding stream for elections. In fairness, though, they are well-worn footsteps.

Among other requests, Fontes’s office asked for slightly more than $1 million ongoing funding, plus $450,000 in a one-time disbursement. Among other things, that money would have been used to hire around a dozen full-time staff to bolster county services and cybersecurity.

They were instead given $0 more in ongoing funding, and a one-time disbursement of $390,000.

By crossing most of what was on their list off of it and squishing money around, the office has managed to offer limited employment contracts to two people.

“The lack of funding for my office, particularly ongoing funding, means less money for physical security for voters looking for in-person assistance, fewer staff to support the counties that run our elections, and inadequate funding to maintain the secure voter registration system that 13 of 15 Arizona counties rely upon,” Fontes said in a statement to Votebeat. “Despite the shortcomings in this budget, we have found, and will continue to pursue, creative ways to further my priorities to ensure safe, secure, and accurate elections across our state.”

It’s a dance the vast majority of election officials know the steps to by heart: the money shuffle. No one requests it at weddings, but it’s all the rage in election offices.

Here at Votebeat, we are not naive. We realize that almost no state or federal office in the history of this great nation has ever been given the full amount they requested unless they are a subsection of the Department of Defense and capable of building a tank depot in Cleveland.

Still, the rejection of Fontes’ request is pretty stark in a state like Arizona, where lawmakers purport to be Very Concerned © about election security issues.

As anyone who has ever run a business can tell you, it’s next to impossible to hire ongoing staff with a one-time infusion of funding. Without a predictable and stable source of money, planned technology and infrastructure upgrades also become difficult to manage. In short, long-term planning — the sort of thing necessary for securing something as massive as a statewide election — becomes impossible.

I’m sure this is an argument that could be made about a lot of issues: education, healthcare, etc. Everyone believes their pet issue is critically underfunded — or at least ineffectively funded.

But it just seems to me — and I know I am biased — that few other parts of society are more integral than your ability to cast a vote fairly and smoothly. That’s an argument that Arizona Republicans in the legislature make almost daily (though, I admit, with different implications), but here they fail to live up to their own standards when absolutely no one is stopping them but themselves.

A heads up: We’re taking time off from this newsletter for Memorial Day weekend. We’ll be back on June 3.

Back Then

In the year 2000 (don’t worry, this is not about hanging chads), Democrats in Arizona held the country’s first legally binding election where voting took place online. That March, more than a third of votes cast in the Democratic presidential primary were cast via dial-up internet “from homes, schools, workplaces or libraries.” Still others cast ballots over “Internet connections at the 124 polling places.” The startup responsible for pulling off the vote was called, and I’m not kidding, Elections.com.

Obviously, there were problems. According to the New York Times coverage at the time, “technical and logistical problems, including an hourlong Web site failure and software problems among users, demonstrated that more safeguards need to be taken before larger groups are asked to vote via computer.”

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From Votebeat Pennsylvania: Inside one northeast Pa. county that has made light work of running “two elections” since the advent of mail-in balloting

From Votebeat Texas: After a setback, a GOP effort to pull Texas out of a multi-state program to clean voter rolls could move forward.

In Other Voting News

Elected officials representing communities of color in Tarrant County, Texas, are asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate recent actions by the county judge and other local officials, and said they are concerned those actions are interfering with voting rights, the Star-Telegram reported.
Indiana voters must now include identification numbers — such as the last four digits of their Social Security number and a driver’s license number — when submitting mail ballots, under a new law that takes effect July 1, WNDU reported.
Some local Ohio election officials are struggling to secure polling locations and poll workers for an August special election they didn’t anticipate, Statehouse News reported, and they’re expecting a higher-than-usual turnout for a vote that would change the process for amending the state constitution.
The Flathead Beacon takes a deep dive into the exodus of staff in the Lincoln County, Montana, elections office, tying their departures to the “Big Lie.”
Sheriff Calvin Hayden of Johnson County, Kansas, testified earlier this year that his office had turned more than 15 statutory violations of election law over to the district attorney’s office, but a public records request found only one referral for which the district attorney said there was not evidence to support bringing criminal charges, the Shawnee Mission Post reported.
Want to spend more time thinking about nightmare election scenarios? TV’s “Succession” has you covered — and Politico writes about what rang true and what didn’t.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

It’s a start! A federal agency is setting aside millions in election security grants.

2023-03-06T12:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

Hi, y’all,

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but a federal agency has allocated money specifically for election security. I know, it seems fake even as I type it, but it happened. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security hands out more than $2 billion in “preparedness grants” to “enhance the capacity to prevent, respond to, and recover from various emergencies.” And this year, for the first time, states and cities who receive the money are required to spend 3 percent of it on “election security.”

It’s the first time elections have gotten a mandatory slice of this money, and it’s something advocates and election officials have asked for for a long time. And, crucially, it isn’t just stringless money: The spending is subject to the approval of the state’s chief elections officer, meaning that the governor can’t just take the money and say it’s being spent on elections while actually spending it on a pet project. Much of the funding will also be passed through to local officials, doing even more to ensure that this is actually spent on something that makes voting more secure.

This is, obviously, not a panacea for our problems. Sure, it’s tens of millions of dollars, more money than I will personally ever have in my life, but also not nearly enough: The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law estimates that it will cost $300 million over the next five years just to protect election workers from threats of physical violence. They say it will cost about $316 million for “basic election security measures.” Lawrence Norden, senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center, called the tens of millions of dollars in new grant money a “huge step towards protecting elections and the people who keep them fair and free.”

“Still, much more must be done by all levels of government as the 2024 election approaches,” he added.

It’s sort of striking that elections have so far not been funded by this program. They were declared critical infrastructure in 2017, a designation that allowed the federal government to take far more interest and ownership in the security of elections. Still, as Rachel Orey of the Bipartisan Policy Center writes, federal funding is “irregular, unpredictable, and insufficient” and the new dollars, while welcome, are “but a drop in the bucket.”

In 2020, the preparedness grants came with a required 5 percent towards “enhancing cybersecurity,” and offered election security as an example of appropriate spending, but did not specifically require spending for elections. Voting wasn’t mentioned at all in any of the other preparedness grants, which DHS has been handing out for more than a decade.

The random funding disbursement is also part of a pretty damaging pattern the federal government has been stuck in since, well, forever: Elections have always been given bursts of money by the federal government without consideration for consistency or future planning. This makes it impossible for county governments to plan future purchases, keep their security up to date, or ensure that they can attract qualified staff and keep them in their jobs.

And, perhaps most glaringly (or at least made-for-TV), we know that autocratic foreign governments are eager to compromise our election security. DHS has told us that repeatedly and for years. It is perhaps the only active foreign entanglement we entrust counties to handle essentially on their own. If the Russian military comes for us, we have the full force of the U.S. military standing in between. If Russian hackers come for Southern Louisiana, let’s hope the Vermilion Parish elections office has two-factor authentication turned on.

This is a step in the right direction. It is, however, a tiny little baby step. Let’s hope that it is a sign of changing priorities.

Back Then

The year 2002 was a big one for the elections space: the Help America Vote Act passed (which created the Election Assistance Commission and authorized the largest-ever funding disbursement for election administration), and the Department of Homeland Security was elevated to a stand alone, cabinet-level agency. Of course, that second thing hasn’t been super relevant to elections until recently. DHS was founded the year before, less than a month after the September 11 attacks.

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From Votebeat Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania court offers conflicting opinions on requirements for fraud evidence in recount petitions

From Votebeat Texas: Two Harris County legislators want to let the state replace local election administrators

In Other Voting News

The Thomas More Society, a conservative legal nonprofit long associated with cases aimed at restricting abortion access, has quietly moved into lawsuits and complaints aimed at questioning the integrity of elections, ProPublica reports.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar is asking state lawmakers for $30 million to create a new statewide voter registration system that he said would enable the state to more seamlessly access to data in real time, KNTV Las Vegas reports.
A Nebraska public hearing on voter ID legislation drew an overflow crowd and lasted for more than seven hours as lawmakers consider three bills that would take varying approaches, the Nebraska Examiner reports.
New Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said she plans to use her “bully pulpit…to push back against legislation that would undermine voting rights” and said her decision to redirect a unit in her office from “election integrity” cases to protecting voter rights has so far brought no pushback. according to her interview with the Guardian.
The Board of Supervisors in Northern California’s Shasta County has thrown the local election process into chaos, cancelling the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems and, at the urging of noted conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, moving ahead with consideration of counting votes by hand, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Secretaries of state already know what they need for the next elections

2023-02-20T17:12:04+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

People who run elections are always deep into thinking about the next elections, and the ones after that. So it was as secretaries of state and state election directors gathered this week at a Washington, D.C., hotel, a few months after a largely smooth midterm election.

The next presidential election is coming fast, and threats to elections continue to loom large. Many high-profile candidates who prominently promoted baseless conspiracy theories about elections did not win, but certainly, some public officials continue to sow doubts.

The national conferences where those responsible for managing elections come together, which happen a couple of times a year, are a window into the constant effort and endless details key to pulling them off — the technology, the deadlines, the processes, the laws.

And, of course, the money and security needed for them.

Election officials around the country have long pushed for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to go towards spiraling election costs; Congress allocated just $75 million for all 50 states earlier this year.

After congressional staff from U.S. House and Senate committees with oversight on elections spoke to secretaries of state about priorities, newly elected Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, pointedly asked about their plans for federal funding, citing a “federal responsibility to help administer these federal elections.”

It’s clear more money for elections faces a difficult path in a divided Congress. Steven Spaulding, of the Senate Rules Committee, had already said that the chair, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, has advocated for more, and said the committee is “striving to work on a bipartisan basis to get that done.”

But Caleb Hayes, the counsel for the Republican majority on the House Administration Committee, wasn’t encouraging. In response to Fontes’ question, he pointed to existing grant programs.

“It is not our position that it makes sense for the federal government to fund the day to day operations of what we see as state government responsibilities,” he said. Fontes rebutted.

“Without something dependable, consistent, and sustainable, we’re sort of guessing” at what federal money will be available, Fontes said.

At other panels, election officials talked about security issues, from cybersecurity to physical security, as they operate in a climate of constant threats.

Speaking as part of the National Association of State Election Directors conference, John Keller, the principal deputy chief of Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, told the crowd that every Federal Bureau of Investigation jurisdiction has an election crime coordinator, or ECC, and asked, “Who has had no contact with the ECC in their jurisdiction?”

There was a pause. No hands went up. “That’s great,” he said.

And Heider Garcia, the elections administrator in Tarrant County, Texas, whose patient approach to election skeptics made him the subject of a Votebeat profile and an episode of “This American Life,” joined a panel Friday morning to talk about his approach to answering questions from constituents who believe incorrect information about elections.

His mindset, he said, is that he isn’t Starbucks and residents of his county can’t go somewhere else. “I’m tied to them and they’re tied to me,” he said. “We’re in this together. We’re like a marriage that has to work and we have to go through this counseling together and just find a way, right?“

In an interview with Votebeat, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said Congress’ failure to set national standards for ballot access and election security means Congress has “abandoned American democracy to the states.”

Griswold listed all the measures she and her state have taken since the 2020 election she said were designed to shore up processes and ensure elections are safe — including a new law meant to protect against insider threats and ensuring the secretary of state can certify election results if a county declines to do so, for example.

“The sentiment is that voters saved democracy in ’22, but we are not out of the woods,” she said.

Back Then

If it seems like the good folks at NASS and NASED conferences have been asking the federal government for the same stuff — mainly money — for decades, you’re right. Consider this reporting from 2001 (children born in this year can now legally drink, which blows my mind): “The only thing the secretaries want of the federal government is more financial help to do the job right so that states won’t be forced to rely on the courts to resolve election standoffs.” The work at that NASS conference informed the writing of the Help America Vote Act, which would pass the next year and — for the first time in history — infuse quite a bit of federal money into the election system.

In Other Voting News

A partially released Georgia grand jury report shows that jurors who are investigating whether former President Donald Trump and others interfered in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election believe that at least one witness may have committed perjury, though the report does not name them, and also that no widespread fraud took place that could overturn the election, the New York Times reported.

An ideologically divided North Carolina Supreme Court granted a request from Republican lawmakers to rehear two recent, hotly contested voting rights cases, on redistricting and voter ID, after Republican candidates won a majority on the court in November, the News & Observer reported.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign paid a research firm to search for fraud and irregularities in the results of the 2020 presidential election, but didn’t release the research after it failed to find evidence that would have affected the outcome of the election, the Washington Post reported.

Some state officials are proposing new measures to combat election conspiracy theories and threats against election officials, pushing back against mistrust of elections and threats that, they say, remain a force, the Washington Post reported.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter.Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Ballot shortages, machine errors, voting disputes: Inside a pattern of election problems in one northeast Pennsylvania county

2023-02-15T18:39:12+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

She may not have known it, but on Nov. 8, Beth Gilbert McBride was experiencing a Luzerne County election tradition. Or perhaps a curse.

Gilbert McBride, who had become acting director of elections just three months earlier, started hearing a trickle of reports in the morning about precincts running out of ballot paper. As the day dragged on, dozens of precincts would report a shortage. Some said they had to turn voters away for lack of paper to use in Luzerne’s ballot-on-demand printers.

Gilbert McBride and her election staff tried to keep track of the affected locations on a movable whiteboard as she rushed around the office trying to deal with the crisis. The county scrambled to order paper from local suppliers, and reams piled up next to the office Pepsi machine, awaiting delivery to the triaged list of 44 precincts. As the situation worsened, a local judge stepped in to order that polls stay open two hours late.

By the end of the day, Luzerne would be singled out by the Department of State as the only county with significant voting problems during an otherwise smooth midterm Election Day for Pennsylvania.

The exact cause of the paper shortage has yet to be disclosed. The local district attorney is investigating but has yet to release his findings, and neither Gilbert McBride nor the County Board of Elections has offered detailed explanations to the many residents who have demanded answers.

Gilbert McBride declined to be interviewed for this story.

What is clear is that the incident was not Luzerne’s first problem during an election and Gilbert McBride is not the first election director to oversee voting there with no prior experience.

Luzerne has cycled through election directors and other staff over the past several years, leading to an immense loss of institutional knowledge and making it an outlier even in an industry that has seen accelerating turnover.

This loss of knowledge, say current and former county officials and longtime election observers, resulted in another Luzerne election debacle. The deeper cause, they tell Votebeat and Spotlight PA, is the county’s unique government structure, low pay, and the stress on election workers.

“A lot of these [problems] are attributable to human error — in fact all these things in one form or another,” said Bob Morgan, who served as election director for eight months in 2021. “But part of it is exacerbated by people just leaving and the next person just kind has to figure things out by themselves and there is no formal training program.”

Gilbert McBride, who is also a Wilkes-Barre city councilwoman, was brand new to the election office when she started as deputy director in July. One month later, her boss was out the door, having served only eight months himself. With the midterms just around the corner, Gilbert McBride was temporarily promoted.

Last week, however, the County Council announced one change it hopes will put county elections back on track: another new elections director, with Gilbert McBride returning to the deputy position.

Turnover and trip-ups

Luzerne’s high turnover in elections leadership began in 2019 when Marisa Crispell, who had previously worked for the department and had experience running elections elsewhere, resigned amid ethics questions. Crispell did not return a call seeking comment.

Since then, the county has had a succession of four elections directors, plus acting director Gilbert McBride. Since the August 2020 resignation of longtime deputy director Mary-Beth Steininger, the county also has had five deputy directors.

One of those deputies was Eryn Harvey, who resigned in February 2022 after less than a year to run unsuccessfully for state representative — and now is Luzerne’s new hire for the top elections job. Harvey was succeeded by a deputy, Sarah Knoell, who stayed roughly three months in the job, which was then filled by Gilbert McBride.*

An analysis of data provided by the county shows the precipitous loss of experience. During the 2016 through 2019 elections, staff in the department had a median of 17 to 22 years of service. That number fell to roughly one year of median experience in 2020 and in 2021, when the November election was administered without a formal director in place.

The November midterm election was run by a staff with a median of 1.5 years experience.

On top of the turnover in the elections department itself, the county has also gone through a number of county managers, who help oversee the department. The latest county manager, Randy Robertson, resigned in November after just six months on the job.

The turnover has led to problems.

During the 2020 election, a worker in Luzerne improperly threw out nine ballots, an incident then-President Donald Trump seized upon to sow doubt in mail voting. The U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania later said there was no criminal intent, and the Pennsylvania Department of State said the mistake was due to poor training.

The director had less than a year of experience at the time.

Then, during the May 2021 primary, Republican ballots displayed on voting machine screens were mistakenly labeled as Democratic. A new director and deputy director had just been hired.

In the November election that year, which was run without a formal director in place, there were errors in printed ballots that had not been caught, two flash drives with votes on them were not uploaded in a timely manner, and mail ballots were sent out very late.

In April 2022, more than 300 ballots were delivered late during a special election, though the Department of State took the blame for that error.

Robertson did not return a call seeking comment, but in a December interview with a local newspaper he repeated his desire for the county to study the “root cause” of election office turnover, which he suggested in July could be due to pay.

Luzerne’s last four directors have been paid $64,500, which is the lowest salary compared to peers in similarly sized counties in the U.S., according to a 2022 survey of local elections officials by Democracy Fund and the Elections and Voting Information Center at Reed College.

Robertson also noted that the home rule structure has caused issues.

A tug-of-war over elections

In most Pennsylvania counties, elected commissioners also sit on county election boards that set rules for elections, such as whether to use drop boxes. But Luzerne is different.

In 2010, the county opted for a form of government few other counties have chosen, home rule. The option allows counties to write their own charter instead of following the state’s established rules for how counties are to organize their government.

This can mean elections are overseen by two masters. One is the county board of elections, whose four members — always two Democrats and two Republicans — are appointed by the county council. Those four members then elect a fifth resident as chair.

But it is the county council which controls the election department’s budget and hires the county manager, who hires and supervises the election director.

This has often led to disputes between the two bodies, including a fracas over control in 2021, when two Republican election board members attempted to elect a chairman who was also a Republican county council member. The county’s charter expressly prohibits elected county officials from serving on the elections board, and the attempt resulted in the two board members being removed.

More recently, the council proposed prohibiting county employees or funds from being used to place drop boxes in an effort to stop their use, despite the elections board’s decision to continue using drop boxes.

“The difficulty [election directors in Luzerne] have is the council thinks you should take your direction from them, and the election board thinks you should take your direction from them, and you’re pretty much certain to make everyone unhappy at some point,” said Morgan, the former election director.

Morgan said he thinks council members feel “they get the blame” when things go wrong and so they face pressure to act, even though they don’t have the same authority their colleagues in non-home rule counties might have.

Bob Morgan, pictured during a training, was Luzerne County’s director of elections for eight months in 2021.

Election directors in Luzerne have sometimes had a very contentious relationship with members of the bodies overseeing them. Shelby Watchilla, a former elections director who oversaw the 2020 election and resigned shortly after it, sued the county and a council member for defamation over comments they made about her handling of the department. The case is ongoing, and the council member at the heart of the dispute resigned in January 2022 to take office as county controller.

“Number one, the pay is not worth what is demanded [and] I think that it is a hostile work environment,” said Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, executive director of the local progressive group Action Together NEPA.

‘Continual negative feedback loop’

Denise Williams, a Democrat who has been chair of the elections board since 2021, agreed that the high turnover has led to election problems, but disagreed that the county’s structure is to blame.

Moving election oversight in 2010 from elected officials into the hands of volunteer, non-elected citizens, unlike in other counties, was the right move, she said. However, there could be better coordination between the different entities on issues like equipment purchases, she said.

Asked whether this structure is causing more stress on the directors and discouraging experienced election workers from applying, Williams said elections everywhere are now under a microscope, and it is making the job more stressful.

“Is it specific to Luzerne County because of the dynamic of the elections? I don’t know — that could be a part of it,” she said. “There’s been a high turnover rate and a loss of a lot of knowledge, and when you come in and you are new and the people above you are new, that is very, very challenging.”

But, she added, “that’s the setup of the government, so anyone who applies knows what they’re getting into.”

John Lombardo, vice chair of the Luzerne County Council, also disagreed that the home rule charter was a cause of turnover but acknowledged that turnover needs to be addressed.

“I think [the cause of the turnover is] definitely because the culture in that department has become unstable, and once that happens, it is hard to right that ship,” he said. “It just continually creates this negative feedback loop.”

Lombardo, a Republican, said the council needs to have more of a say in overseeing the elections since they provided funding. He favors an amendment to the county charter to allow a council member to serve as board chair, which isn’t currently allowed in Luzerne. These types of appointments have not been an issue in non-home rule counties, where commissioners serve on the board, he said.

Citizens have hard time trusting local government

Conservative activists allege that the county’s history with corruption has made it difficult for residents to trust local officials’ explanations for recent election errors.

Ben Herring, an activist with a local right-wing group the Citizens Advisory of Pennsylvania — which formed in 2021 to influence school board elections and “keep Critical Race Theory out of schools” — specifically mentioned one of the state’s most infamous scandals, known as “Kids for Cash,” in which two Luzerne County judges in 2008 took kickbacks from child detention centers for sentencing children to those centers.

The incident made Luzerne synonymous with corruption for some, and residents like Herring have not forgotten. Now some residents are suspicious when things go wrong with the county’s elections, he said.

“I think if we didn’t have this history we would sway more toward this being a mistake,” he said of the Election Day paper shortage. But without answers to their questions, he said, they’re forced to wonder, “Is this some underground thing that we don’t know about or are we overthinking it?”

Herring said he believed the issues with the department go deeper than a lack of institutional knowledge, insisting there must be some type of manual or written guidance for elections’ employees to follow.

Morgan said there isn’t any such manual, but residents shouldn’t be surprised that one doesn’t exist. Morgan likened the extra work of creating a manual to firemen shining the firetruck when there are fires going on, saying that there are more urgent things to be done in administering elections.

His version of onboarding was his boss handing him a copy of the ballot for the upcoming election and saying, “Proof this.” Similarly, Morgan left little in the way of instructions for his successor, Michael Susek, the director who left when Gilbert McBride was barely 30 days into her job as deputy.

For his part, Morgan said he understands why “Kids for Cash” bred distrust. But what, he asked, could possibly be gained from a paper shortage? And how would such a conspiracy be organized? Residents need to understand that the explanations are more mundane than they imagine, he said.

While working for a congressman, Morgan often heard from constituents who thought the federal government was conspiring against them when errors with their paperwork occurred. It often resulted from misunderstanding how government works — and an almost comical overestimation of government’s ability to orchestrate complicated efforts.

“I’d say, ‘Let me remind you of something, we are required by law to conspire to deliver the mail, and how are we doing?’ ” he said.

Of course, so far, no one has explained exactly what led to the paper shortages.

District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that the “bulk of the legwork” of his investigation into the paper shortage had been completed and he expected to have a report soon, though he did not offer a timeframe. When asked, he said it “will be determined by the results” of the investigation whether the cause of the paper shortage was human error.

Now that the county has hired a new election director, Lombardo would like to bring in an outside consultant, perhaps from the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, to study the department.

“Hopefully,” he said, “that will give us the secret sauce to make changes and have progress there.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Correction, Feb. 16: This article originally stated that Luzerne has had four deputy directors since August 2020 and that Eryn Harvey immediately preceded Gilbert McBride as a deputy elections director. One other deputy was in the job for roughly three months before Gilbert McBride.

State lawmakers need to consider practical realities when it comes to elections

2023-02-13T12:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

Strap in, because this newsletter is about government procurement.

Have you read a “request for proposal?” Or, as those in the know call them, an RFP? Let me introduce you to this thrilling library of them, housed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. They are the very long things counties write soliciting proposals from companies interested in selling a voting system (or any expensive thing) to the county. They lay out the county’s requirements for the system — technical specifications, wishes, dreams — and offer background on the office making the purchase and how the bidding process will work.

After the RFP is published, bidding can take several more months, a contract is issued, there is perhaps litigation over the contract, and at some point — maybe not until the litigation is resolved but certainly not before the contract has been awarded — the machines get built to the specifications required. They are delivered, supply chain willing, months after that. In other words, it can frequently take more than a year between a community deciding it needs new voting machines and the arrival of said machines.

I walk you through this mind-numbing process because (I don’t know if you have noticed) state legislatures are up and running. And if they’ve proven one thing over and over and over again, it’s that they love to write bills about what voting machines everyone is required to buy without actually considering practical realities, such as a timeline that is close to an edict in county government and changes for no man or bill.

Consider some truly bananas recent reporting from Texas reporter Natalia Contreras. In short (though, please read the whole thing, it’s very good), Texas legislators in 2021 passed a bill that requires the entire state to purchase fictional machines by 2026. The new law was created to solve a fictional problem — that somehow poll workers were changing votes as the totals are in transport, which they cannot and do not. So lawmakers set requirements for voting machines that can’t be met by currently existing equipment. Natalia does a better job explaining the technical points than I will here, but take my word for it: These machines do not exist. And even if they did, the bill is roughly pegged to cost more than $100,000,000. Eight zeroes. E-i-g-h-t.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, voters approved a series of expansive voting reforms that will cost millions of dollars. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson will ask for up to $12 million to purchase and secure drop boxes, which don’t get manufactured in a hurry. If the state Legislature there drags its feet, the state may not have them in time for 2024.

History is replete with other such examples. You’ll recall my thoughts on HR 1, among them: That legislators were trying to require machines pegged to Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0, a set of voting machines standards and specifications, by 2024 when those machines would not even exist until 2025. Or the Illinois Automatic Voter Registration system, which required a wildly fast timeline that was obviously not possible, and as a result, the system has been plagued with problems since.

I don’t think legislators have learned from their mistakes. They often don’t. Instead, I anticipate that very many legislators will write bills requiring the full deployment of brand-new voting machines, scanners, tabulators or whatever else while ignoring the realities of the market.

I’m repeating myself here, but machines pegged to the VVSG 2.0 won’t be available for purchase until 2025. And, again, the process of purchasing them after they’ve been invented takes multiple months. Once those machines arrive at the county, it will take several months more to distribute them, train staff and poll workers how to use them, and mount the necessary voter education campaigns so that the public is prepared to cast ballots on them.

It is a lot of work. It is a lot of time. And laws that demand fictitious machines don’t make the clock spin faster. Instead, the laws have to be repealed, amended, or argued about in court. And who has time for that, honestly? Election administrators certainly don’t.

Back Then

Among my favorite fact about elections is that there was no requirement to have a digital, statewide voter roll until the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which required the “establishment of a centralized, interactive, statewide voter registration list linked to relevant agencies and all polling sites.” 2002 was a fascinating year — Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me,” for example, was the Billboard song of the year. It was not, however, a time when the internet was particularly user-friendly. States were required to have these voter rolls in place by 2005, but — see where I’m going with this — they were mostly incomplete across the country until around 2010. It turns out, making a huge government database from stacks of paper stored in hundreds of places isn’t that easy.

New From Votebeat

From Votebeat Arizona: How an Arizona official is making Cochise County a “laboratory” for election skepticism

From Votebeat Michigan: New estimate says $45 million for early in-person voting and new drop boxes for Michigan

From Votebeat Pennsylvania: Commonwealth Court rejects Senate Republicans’ attempt to force release of voter information

From Votebeat Texas: Overlooked provision of SB1 requires election equipment that doesn’t exist, at a cost of $100 million

In Other Voting News

Lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems say Fox News has so far failed to turn over evidence in a high-profile defamation case, NBC News reported. The trial is set to begin later this year.
Local officials are asking Tarrant County’s commissioner court to create an election integrity unit that would investigate potential cases of fraud and election practices, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices agree undated or wrongly dated mail ballots cannot be counted, but offered no clear guidance on how counties should determine whether a ballot has been wrongly dated, a situation likely to create a patchwork of policies in different counties, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Black Lives Matter volunteers who brought food and water to early voters on long lines in Georgia during the 2020 election broke no laws, state election officials found, dismissing a complaint and referring the woman who filed it for potential charges for bringing a gun into a polling place, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported.
Georgia state election officials don’t recommend a takeover of Fulton County’s elections, saying the county has improved its performance since the beginning of a prolonged review, but said future reviews need to be handled differently and the state must create a uniform process for the assessments, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Two years after Jan. 6, has Congress done enough to protect elections?

2023-01-09T11:00:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Jan. 6. Has Congress done enough to prevent future political violence driven by lies about elections?

While I give credit for the (again, nearly two years coming) passage of Electoral Count Act Reform in the recent omnibus package, the funding for elections in that bill amounted to a slap in the face for election administrators continuing to battle election conspiracy theorists to this day. It’s rare to read about voting systems in the United States without the inclusion of a word like “crumbling” or “antiquated.” We have known about these problems for more than a decade, and local officials and advocates have been clear about their needs.

For the last two years, local election administrators and elected officials have been consistently asking Congress to allocate $400 million for elections in the FY2023 omnibus. But as talks of the omnibus wore on, the number kept getting smaller. The first one I heard tossed around was $200 million — a tiny fraction of the actual need. Shockingly, $75 million was the final total.

In a statement calling the $75 million “a down payment,” Common Cause Director of Voting & Elections Sylvia Albert said the total was “a fraction of the investment that will be required to protect our elections and the will of voters from threats both foreign and domestic.”

Sam Oliker-Friedland, the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government, equated the amount to dumping out a “bag of pennies on election official’s doorsteps.” Which is fabulous imagery, but also mathematically true, given how far $75 million will go spread out over more than 10,000 election jurisdictions. For context, the recent unsuccessful gubernatorial recall election in California cost the state a total of $200 million.

Why, you may ask, did Congress fling such a paltry sum at election offices nationwide, at a time when they are desperate for funds, elections administrators are leaving in droves, and threats are still coming in hot across the country?

Advocates and local officials who took part in the discussions tell me that election funding was used as a negotiating tool with Republicans, who were not as keen on it. And so, it shrank. The $75 million didn’t even merit a mention in the Senate Democrats’ summary of the package.

Given all the hullabaloo Democrats made over the need for election funding not too long ago, one might assume that Republicans — who now constitute a majority of the House — may have simply organizationally outmatched the Democrats in negotiations. One would then watch the news and reassess whether that is possible.

The party’s leader-in-waiting, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, failed to win sufficient support over multiple rounds of voting this week for his bid to be speaker of the house. It is the first time in more than a century that voting went beyond the first ballot. McCarthy lost repeatedly in humiliating fashion, despite having publicly moved into the office designated for the Speaker of the House on Monday. In fact, Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of the Republican members opposing him, wrote to the architect of the Capitol to ask how long McCarthy could reasonably occupy the space “before he is considered a squatter.”

This apparently formidable hurdle was foreseen (by everyone paying close attention). Still, Republicans failed to coalesce around McCarthy (or anyone) despite the advanced warning, leading to the following real-time characterizations of the GOP’s recent state: “Increasingly desperate”; “total collapse”; “circus”; “crisis of its own creation”; “on the verge of becoming a total clown show.”

The whole point of having a speaker of the House is to rally votes. In other words, speaker impasse aside, don’t expect a lot of productivity from this House of Representatives going forward.

So how much does it matter? Congress passed ECA reform. Wasn’t that the big response to January 6th? Isn’t the $75 million a bonus?

Not to local election offices who increasingly have less access to private grants, and whose states rarely — if ever — acknowledge the crumbling elections infrastructure they operate, leaving public servants to defend democracy with the equivalent of a handful of gravel. And certainly not to voters, who saw massive election administration problems in counties small and large, with a clear pattern of lack of resources and staff turnover to blame.

Yesterday, the president awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors, to law enforcement officers and election workers who put themselves on the line defending democracy after the 2020 election and the U.S. Capitol against insurrectionists. Recipients include former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers.

Will they be asked to do so again? Those who rallied around funding in 2022 (and 2021, and 2020, and 2019, and 2018 …) have pledged to try again this year. Two years after a violent mob seeking to overturn an election stormed the U.S. Capitol, let’s hope that history does not continue to repeat itself.

Back Then

So who was this guy (obviously, it was a guy) you keep hearing about who got elected after nine rounds of ballots 100 years ago in his bid to be speaker of the house? It was Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts.

Like McCarthy, he was despised by a faction of the Republican Party— that time, though, it was a progressive faction, and he’d already served as speaker for two terms. Ultimately he largely agreed to their demands and was re-elected in 1923.

It’s funny how even the faintest echoes of history can still be heard 100 years later.

New From Votebeat

Pinal County’s outgoing elections director collected a $25,000 bonus for running a smooth election despite reporting final results with significant inaccuracies, including around 500 uncounted votes in the neck-and-neck attorney general race, Jen Fifield reports for Votebeat Arizona.

In earlier stories, Jessica Huseman reported that the final recount results shrank the attorney general’s margin to a razor-thin 280 votes, and ballot-counting errors in Pinal County were largely responsible for the shift. And Fifield reported that in court last month, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s legal team seized on a new explanation for some of the Election Day problems in Maricopa County, arguing it shows malicious intent that ultimately changed the election outcome.

Al Schmidt, a Republican who famously stood up to former President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020 while receiving death threats, has been nominated to be Pennsylvania’s top election official, Carter Walker reports for Votebeat Pennsylvania.

Good-government advocates and voting experts say Pennsylvania should change a recount law that was weaponized by activists and delayed the state’s certification by several weeks. A Votebeat and Spotlight PA review of historical legislative records and news articles found that the 1927 provision has not been substantially updated in the near-century since its passage, and was designed to combat a type of fraud now easily detected by modern improvements to election administration, Walker reports for Votebeat Pennsylvania.

Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers in late December unanimously certified the results of the partial recount of the November election, leading to slight changes in vote tallies for two ballot proposals and confirming the original successful passage of both, Oralandar Brand-Williams reports for Votebeat Michigan.

Nearly two months after the general election, Harris County election officials still do not know whether ballot paper shortages and late polling site openings prevented people from voting on Election Day, Natalia Contreras reports for Votebeat Texas.

In Other Voting News

Records and reporting show Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan requested the resignation of state Elections Director Deborah Scroggin after sometimes overruling Scroggin, a “stickler” unwilling to make exceptions to rules and deadlines, because of concerns that the elections director wasn’t customer service-oriented enough, Willamette Week reported.
Local election officials in Wisconsin and Nevada are the latest to provide documents recording their contact with key players attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election to Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigation, CNN reported.
New transcripts released by the U.S. House Committee investigating the events of January 6th shed additional light on the discussions in the White House leading up to former President Donald Trump’s decision to fire, via tweet, Chris Krebs, then the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Washington Post reported.
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz said he was simply a consultant to a lawsuit from GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem seeking to ban the use of voting machines in Arizona, and should not be subject to legal sanctions for his limited role, the Arizona Republic reported. A federal judge last month dismissed the case and ordered sanctions against the lawyers involved, though Lake and Finchem have appealed the ruling.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

What brought down one Texas county’s entire elections department? It was something in the water.

2022-08-29T10:15:00+00:00

Last November’s sleepy constitutional amendment election nearly came to blows in Gillespie County, a central Texas county known for its vineyards. A volunteer poll watcher, whose aggressive behavior had rankled election workers all day, attempted to force his way into a secure ballot vault.

The burly man was repeatedly blocked by a county elections staffer. Shouting ensued. “You can’t go in there,” the staffer, Terry Hamilton, insisted to the man, who towered over Hamilton. “We can see anything we want!” the poll watcher and his fellow election integrity activists yelled, according to an election worker who witnessed the scene. They accused Hamilton and Elections Administrator Anissa Herrera of a variety of violations of the state elections code, which they quoted, line by line.

“Oh Lord, they can cite chapter and verse,” recalled Sue Bentch, a Fredericksburg election judge who saw the confrontation that night. “But you know, just as the devil can cite scripture for its own purposes it seemed to me that it was often cited out of context and misinterpreted.”

“Finally, I called the sheriff’s officer,” said Bentch. The officer barred the activists from the vault. “Poor Terry was coming to fisticuffs.”

Previous elections had been no better. In 2020, a poll watcher called the cops on Herrera and filmed election employees in a dark parking lot. The same year, Herrera received a clutch of obscene, often racist, emails. And in 2019, a group of activists filed suit after Fredericksburg voters overwhelmingly rejected an obscure public-health ballot measure. That election, the activists argued, had been irrevocably tainted by fraud.

Three years of these hostilities were clearly enough for Herrera, who resigned this month.

The rest of the office staff — one full-time employee and one part-time employee — also departed, leaving the elections office completely vacant.

Recent media coverage of the exodus attributed it to threats of the type that have become common since the 2020 presidential election. In fact, Votebeat’s review of court documents, emails, and social media postings show Herrera and others struggling to combat fringe election conspiracy theories in Gillespie County long before former President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to question the integrity of the 2020 vote.

In Gillespie County in 2019, the fringe was focused on fluoride.

The city charter amendment that sparked a crusade against Herrera, only months after she took the post as elections director, was a proposal to remove fluoride from Fredericksburg’s water system. The measure failed, and the activists behind it suspected malfeasance. Members of the group insisted they’d been unlawfully prevented from closely observing a recount of votes and sued the city’s then-mayor.

Then, as Trump’s rhetoric began to heat up closer to November 2020, the Gillespie County Republican Party brought energy and structure to what was, up to that point, a small local movement. In the two years since, as lawmakers rewrote Texas’s election laws and Herrera’s working hours ballooned, she found it impossible to lead a normal working life in the elections office.

“The threats against election officials and my election staff, dangerous misinformation, lack of full time personnel for the elections office, unpaid compensation, and absurd legislation have completely changed the job I initially accepted,” Herrera wrote in her resignation letter, dated August 2. “The life commitment I have given to this job is unsustainable.”

Born and raised in Gillespie County, Herrera and her family have been active members of the community for generations. Herrera’s grandmother established the county’s first Mexican restaurant in the 1970s. In 2019, when the county first created a standalone elections office, separating it from the clerk’s office where Herrera had worked for years assisting with elections, she took the reins. She was excited to be selected for “her dream job,” those who know her said.

Records and interviews show that, in the three years that followed, the job quickly consumed her life.

Herrera herself wouldn’t talk about it. “I am done with this career, unfortunately,” Herrera told Votebeat last week, declining to comment further.

But in contrast with the rancor from activists, county officials spoke highly of Herrera’s work ethic.

“She’d given everything to this job,” said Cathy Collier, the chair of the county’s Democratic party and member of the county’s elections commission.

“That’s a lot of work—a tremendous amount of work that she does,” said county Sheriff Buddy Mills, an elected Republican. “As far as I can tell you, everything is top notch.”

“I don’t think anyone is under the assumption that the election would be as smooth as if we still had Anissa,” said Mark Stroeher, the county judge, also an elected Republican. “I don’t think it’ll be that easy to find someone.”

The county next door, Blanco, has been without an elections director for two years.

A fracas over fluoride

Anti-fluoride groups have been active in the United States for decades, but have experienced a bump in popularity in recent years. By 2018, more than 70 cities in the United States had banned adding fluoride to their water systems, including some in Texas. Fredericksburg, the largest city in Gillespie County, held its own vote in 2019.

For years, Texas’s most vocal critic of fluoridated water has been Laura Pressley of Williamson County, a perennial candidate for office in central Texas who has yet to win a race. Local press often highlights her advocacy of disproven conspiracy theories. She has appeared on Alex Jones’ programming, and has said that “something was planted” in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. In recent years, she has become a self-styled poll watching expert and vocal opponent of electronic voting systems, training hundreds of people across the state in what election administrators say are disruptive practices that harm election integrity.

“Our elections are the representation of free will, and if we can’t trust that our free will is being represented legally and accurately, then God’s will is being thwarted,” she said at a meeting in Hood County in 2021. In recent years, she’s filed unsuccessful lawsuits against counties across the state over a variety of alleged voting problems.

Pressley did not respond to requests for an interview.

Records show Pressley became involved in a small anti-fluoride movement in Fredericksburg, teaming up with several locals, including Jeanette Hormuth and Jerry Farley. Their group — Clean Water Fred — began a campaign to remove fluoride from the city’s water, gathering enough signatures to prompt a special election on the issue, held in November of 2019.

In a low-turnout election, Fredericksburg residents soundly rejected the measure in an initial count of 1,258 votes to 742.

It wasn’t a close result, but Clean Water Fred suspected fraud, and they gathered enough signatures to force a recount. The Dec. 2, 2019 recount confirmed the results, even adding three “no” votes to the original total.

Pressley came to town for the recount, and affidavits filed in the group’s lawsuit and interviews with people present detail behavior by Pressley that was disruptive. The affidavits — filed by Pressley, Hormuth, and Farley — also show she instructed others in the group to engage in similar behavior, and they did as she instructed.

Pressley, for example, told Farley to join her in repeatedly saying, “I challenge the result” after the counting of each ballot. When the pair was asked to stop, he and Pressley instead said it under their breath. After Pressley was admonished by county staff for hovering near the table where volunteers were counting, at one point sitting down alongside them, she told Hormuth to call the secretary of state’s office to complain. Hormuth did so.

Hormuth declined to comment for this piece, citing the pending litigation.

The group remained unsatisfied even after the recount, and Hormuth and Farley filed a lawsuit on Dec. 31.

The Gillespie County courthouse in Fredericksburg, Texas.

The lawsuit contends that because of “so many material mistakes, illegalities, irregularities, and potential fraud that occurred in the administration of the election and the tabulation of election results” that “the true outcome of the election cannot be ascertained.”

Pressley was the group’s go-to expert for election questions. “She was ‘coaching’ that group in the election with the fluoride issue,” Stroeher wrote in a 2020 email to the county attorney.

Records and interviews suggest the group’s behavior continued in 2020 and beyond.

Angela Smith, a local activist who wrote an affidavit in support of the group’s 2019 lawsuit, served as an early voting poll watcher in October of 2020. When early voting ended for the day, Smith was not allowed back into the elections building. In an email to the county attorney and county judge, Herrera wrote that Smith then called local police before parking outside of the office and beginning to film.

“Ms. Smith was blatantly filming 5 of my temporary elections clerks without their consent as they left the building, making them feel uncomfortable and intimidated,” Herrera wrote to other county officials. “I am concerned one or more of my temporary clerks may not return due to this incident.”

Smith declined to comment for this story.

County Attorney Steven Wadsworth forwarded the email to local police. “Sadly, I think that having some extra patrols around [the counting facility] tonight and tomorrow is prudent,” Wadsworth wrote the day before the 2020 election. “I think having some extra patrols around the courthouse area and all polling locations - sadly - is also prudent.”

Wadsworth did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

The battles even made local news.

A report by KXAN shows Hormuth and Smith explaining that they were prevented from poll watching in 2019 and 2020, and had filed a complaint with the secretary of state regarding the matter. The station identified the pair as Republicans. The TV station reached out to Herrera, Hamilton (the full-time hourly worker in the office), Stroeher and Wadsworth for comment but they declined. An email obtained by Votebeat through a public records request suggests it’s because they thought Pressley might be behind the story.

“I do not know who made the complaint, but if Ms. Pressley did so, be aware that she has a history of making these types of complaints and then filing a civil lawsuit as well,” Wadsworth wrote. “I think it would be prudent to approach the situation as if litigation is pending.”

The result was a one-sided news story that offered no defense from the county. The secretary of state took no action against the office as a result of the complaint, but hate mail flowed into Herrera’s inbox from across the country anyway.

“Fucking Anissa! Go back to Mexico bitch! You are obstructing the election process and will be prosecuted!” wrote one emailer, the day after the KXAN segment aired. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The same week, a woman who said she was from California emailed Herrera, linking to the piece. “BITCH !! YOU GOT CAUGHT IN A LIE,” she wrote. “LEARN TO OBEY STATE AND FEDERAL LAW … OR GO TO JAIL!” Days later, the woman emailed again. “WE JUST TURNED YOUR NAME IN TO THE LT. GOVERNOR’S OFFICE FOR INVESTIGATION,” she wrote. The day before, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had offered a cash bounty for proof of voter fraud.

“AND BY THE WAY … YOU’RE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA NOW. TRY TO REMEMBER THAT … OK?” she concluded. The emailer did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

“I guess I will be receiving these daily,” Herrera wrote, forwarding the woman’s complaints to county leadership. “Any idea who I report them to?”

By the time the local news piece aired, emails show Moe Saiidi, the chair of the county GOP, had begun repeatedly contacting Herrera to complain about poll worker treatment and demand changes to procedure that were not allowed under state law. They’d also recruited poll watchers, warning them to watch out for fraud. Saiidi did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

A pro-Trump sign on a truck parked on West U.S. Highway 290, heading into Fredericksburg.

“They lost an election, so they probably think there’s something wrong,” Mills, the sheriff, said in an interview after Herrera’s departure this month. Smirking, he looked under a stack of paperwork on his desk and found a copy of the film “2000 Mules,” created by Texas group True the Vote with conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza. It purports to “expose” fraud in the 2020 election, but has been soundly debunked and roundly criticized. He said someone mailed the DVD to him from Houston.

Mills said he watched the movie. He didn’t believe the underlying claims, but said he understood how others would.

Only days before Herrera’s final day as elections administrator, the local GOP hosted a watch party for the movie. In July, they’d hosted an informational event that cost guests between $5 and $20. It was a speech by Alan Vera — a widely known Republican activist on election issues who helped found True the Vote.

Low pay, long hours

Herrera is one of a growing number of elections officials who have walked away from their jobs since the 2020 election, and the reasons offered in her resignation letter echo concerns ratcheting around the country. The wave of departures among capable, dedicated election staff is seen by many experts as a looming problem with repercussions for future elections. In Texas, nearly 40 election administrators have quit in the last two years.

Those who worked with Herrera said she and her staff routinely voiced frustrations with the long hours, which had grown even longer and more stressful since Texas began further restricting voting regulations and stepping up penalties for administrative errors after the 2020 election.

“People don’t realize just how much the job takes,” said Collier. “They work until late at night. They’re there early in the morning, on holidays. Anissa would send out something I needed to know and I would notice that the email was sent out at like 1 o’clock in the morning.”

The Gillespie County elections office in Fredericksburg.

The county posted a three-page job opening for Herrera’s position this week. The starting salary is listed at about $54,000. At the time of her resignation, Herrera made just over $45,000, though she was offered a raise to the listed rate, which would have taken effect in October had she stayed. Gillespie officials said Herrera’s sole full-time employee, Hamilton, who’d nearly come to blows with poll watchers, made $15.19 an hour. The only other staffer, who worked part time, made $11.67 an hour. The cost of living in Fredericksburg — a Hill Country hotspot popular for bachelorette parties and wine-fueled vacations — comes at a premium. One ranking recently named it the most unaffordable city in the state.

Before she resigned, Herrera had asked the county for two additional full-time employees. Only one was approved, and it would not be advertised until well after the time counties are expected to have begun preparing for the November election.

The first staffer to quit, according to Stroher, was the part-time employee. Then, Hamilton resigned to run as a write-in candidate for county treasurer. That left Herrera faced with running the upcoming election entirely on her own. It was, it seems, the last straw.

David Becker is the executive director and founder of Center for Election Innovation & Research. His nonprofit works with election officials nationwide and provides legal assistance to election officials who are threatened with frivolous criminal prosecution, harassment, or physical violence, though he hasn’t yet worked with Gillespie County.

“It’s not surprising that some of them are saying, ‘Enough’ and ‘I can’t do this anymore’. ‘I’m inadequately resourced, inadequately paid and the requirements that are being placed upon me are not helping voters. They’re not helping elections be more secure,’” he said.

With the midterms less than three months away, the outlook for Gillespie County’s elections looks shaky. The secretary of state’s office will have to step in to train other county employees, only some of whom have previously worked elections, to manage voting in November — a far cry from the years of elections management experience Herrera brought to her position. And in a county now packed with dozens of angry activists scrutinizing every move the county makes, experts say controversy there is unlikely to die down simply because Herrera resigned.

“If you lose your professional election officials who are experienced in these procedures, who understand the equipment, understand the records, who understand the legal requirements, you can end up in a really bad place,” Becker said. “I do worry about what voters are going to find when they go to the polls if there aren’t experienced professional election administrators.”

Collier, the chair of the county Democratic Party, is also worried.

“If you know any county clerk or elections administrator, you know that these people are fanatics about making things absolutely accurate and absolutely fair. It’s their passion and their job and Anissa was no different than that, nor was her staff,” she said.

“She was meticulous about getting the job done. It’s going to be very difficult to replace her.”

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Votebeat editorial director Jessica Huseman contributed research to this report.

Pinal’s election meltdown was years in the making

2022-08-19T23:22:45+00:00

In Pinal County earlier this month, some Election Day voters waited hours for a primary ballot at polling places that had run out. They grew frustrated waiting for printers in the election office to slowly spit out additional ballots that then had to be trucked to sites around the county.

Poll workers — already struggling because, they later said, they weren’t properly trained and didn’t have the tools to do their jobs — couldn’t do much about it. They couldn’t reach the county at times to ask for help, consistently encountering lengthy holds when they called a hotline.

The county supervisors were getting calls. Supervisor Mike Goodman went out and saw the frustration at polling sites around the county firsthand. He begged people not to leave, to wait in line as long as it took. But some left anyway, without casting a ballot.

Frustrations came to a head when one man grew so angry, he caused a disturbance at a polling place in a San Tan Valley school, according to the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office. He refused to leave and was arrested.

The county later determined that more than 20 precincts had ballot shortages on Election Day, leaving some voters to wait for hours to vote — or to simply give up.

Pinal’s debacle on Election Day came right on the heels of another huge screw-up: In July, the elections department sent out more than 60,000 early ballots that didn’t include town elections. Officials had to scramble to send a second set of ballots to those voters.

The county still can’t say how many people weren’t able to vote in the primary. No one knows whether those voters could have shifted the election outcomes, especially in close, local races farther down the ballot.

It’s now clear that Pinal County’s former elections director, who had only been on the job a few months and has since been fired, didn’t order nearly enough ballots to account for a largely Republican populace that’s increasingly wary of voting by mail.

But it’s also clear that no one factor was responsible and there were plenty of warning signs no one heeded. The county didn’t allocate enough resources for elections and failed to exercise full oversight of the office, even as rapid employee turnover prompted the hiring of inexperienced people who were struggling to communicate clearly.

“We could see months ahead of time that this was a train wreck in slow motion,” said Brenda Gifford, a Republican precinct captain who lives in the county.

At a packed public meeting this week, a parade of poll workers and observers spent several hours telling county supervisors about all kinds of problems at their polling sites: locked cages of supplies that didn’t come with keys, polling places that opened an hour or two late, minimal training to do their jobs properly, missing equipment, a phone line designed to help them that wasn’t answered.

Supervisors warned attendees not to applaud or heckle, but there were outbursts anyway — including a round of applause when Gifford called on the entire board and the county manager to resign.

“This has been a grand embarrassment,” said Jeffrey McClure, the chairman of the supervisors, acknowledging the election problems.

The county has installed a local, recognizable face as the new elections director: the recorder, Virginia Ross, who stepped down from her elected office to take over and rebuild the elections department.

She will have to reckon with the ways in which the county’s focus on creating a lean government, at low cost to taxpayers, backfired in the elections department, where even small errors can create massive distrust of a fundamental process.

“Because we were so lean, we had single points of failure. There [weren’t] redundancies, there wasn’t the ability to have people double-checking,” County Attorney Kent Volkmer told the county board.

The county’s election staff in 2022 was roughly the same size as when Ross first took office in 2013, even though the county’s registered voters increased from around 83,000 to about 275,000, Ross said. A lack of continuity and local experience in the elections department, and a lack of oversight and management by the county manager and supervisors, kept the department from reorganizing and growing at the same pace the county did.

With a growing county, and with such an important mission, the department should not have been stretched that thin, Supervisor Jeff Serdy said.

“If any department needs to be better taken care of, it’s obviously this department. Because this is such a sacred right. And this should never happen again because of that,” Serdy said.

Pinal, of course, is far from the only jurisdiction trying to do more with less. Across the country, elections are underfunded, understaffed, and under intense scrutiny, leading to turnover of experienced elections workers. One report from the Bipartisan Policy Center noted that elections were “chronically — and in some cases, haphazardly — underfunded.” This lack of funding “leads to antiquated technology and equipment, understaffed election offices, and overworked officials.”

Pinal County’s disasters show what voters across the country may soon face if the public doesn’t invest in elections.

At a time when partisans are prone to claim fraud, it’s imperative to provide resources for smooth elections that could prevent errors like the ones in Pinal, said Rachael Dean Wilson, the head of external affairs for the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

“We have a tendency to solve problems only after they emerge, not ahead of time,” she said. “But this is the moment, if we ever need to be very forward-thinking of the things that could go wrong in our elections and bolster them, now is the time.”

A barrage of problems on Election Day

In Pinal, every public discussion of the election problems has been tinged with frustration and anger. The day after the Aug. 2 primary, a board meeting and press conference showcased poll workers and candidates who demanded to know how their races — and their neighbors — were affected by the lapses.

Some threatened to file lawsuits, and at least a couple have. One, from Arizona Sen. Kelly Townsend, a Republican who lost her primary, sought an injunction to stop the canvassing of the election, though a hearing wasn’t set until after the Aug. 12 canvass deadline.

“How do we reconcile the harm that I see, not just to my own race, but to my voters? My neighbors were deeply disenfranchised,” Townsend said on Aug. 3.

In the days that followed, Ross, in her new position, tried to figure out what went wrong with the ballots. Her initial review found that the now-fired director, David Frisk, had modeled the number of in-person voters he was expecting by assuming the voters on the Active Early Voting List, who would automatically receive mailed ballots, wouldn’t vote in person. He then added a 1% buffer to the ballot supply totals.

Those calculations left the county massively short in some areas on Election Day.

Ross said someone with local knowledge and an understanding of Arizona GOP voters’ growing distrust of mailed ballots should have known to order far more, despite the number of voters on the list to receive mail ballots.

The county’s elections officials are each responsible for figuring out how many ballots to order. State statute says each precinct should print enough early and printed ballots to exceed at least 1% of registered voters in that precinct. The secretary of state’s office, in the elections procedures manual, suggests local officials take into account factors like previous turnout, number of voters, and past voting patterns when projecting turnout.

Ross said both Democrats and Republicans were affected by the shortages. The county, though, has far more Republicans than Democrats. Some poll workers said their sites ran out of Republican ballots in the morning.

To create more ballots on the fly, the county relied on two “antiquated” printers that could print just one ballot every three minutes, making 40 per hour, Volkmer, the county attorney, said. He said the county contacted its representative at Runbeck Election Services, which printed its ballots, but were told Runbeck couldn’t help because the county needed small batches across multiple precincts. Runbeck, however, told Votebeat it didn’t hear from the county, and that the company “would have been able to assist in printing additional ballots regardless of the size of the order.”

The county has so far said there’s no indication of criminal intent or illegality with the election problems. And officials don’t think any outside agency or group is to blame.

“It was fully within our [county],” Volkmer said. “Again, it was lean. There were single points of failure. We relied on a professional to our detriment.”

Brewing troubles behind the scenes

Long before Election Day, signs of distress in the department were bubbling up.

Frisk, the former elections director, wasn’t hired until March 2022. He came on board with a staff of two, one of whom was practically on their way out the door, while two new workers started later in March. His office lacked much local election experience, and they had five months to get up to speed and pull off a successful election.

Citizens who were active in local politics struggled to communicate with the department. Poll workers said they weren’t trained well on the equipment or procedures they’d need to follow in their roles.

“It was unbelievably understaffed. And we could all tell you that because we would call and call and call and call without any good outcome,” said Gifford, the Republican precinct captain.

Frisk was fired two days after the primary. A second worker in the office, who was still in their probationary period, was also fired this month, county spokesman James Daniels told Votebeat. That worker was not meeting expectations, he said.

Pinal’s separate elections office is relatively new. The county created it in 2017. Before that, the recorder was in charge. The change was spurred by the county’s growth, which made the job too big for one person, Ross said. She trusted the then-director, Michelle Forney, and communicated with her constantly.

“There are pros and cons” to splitting the operations, Ross said. “For an elected official, apparently, it’s double the work, and no extra pay,” because the state Legislature sets the pay for recorders.

Serdy, who wasn’t on the board when the split happened, questioned why the change was made at all. It seemed elections ran smoothly before, he said.

“I want to hear: Where did the breakdown start? Is it all the way back to 2017? Why didn’t we see this happen?” Serdy told Votebeat.

Forney left the job after the 2020 election for a position in the Nevada Secretary of State’s office. The county named an interim director, Stephanie Cooper. A group of residents urged the board last summer to promote an elections director from within instead of hiring from outside the community, saying it sent a good message about opportunities for advancement and ensured continuity in the office. Cooper applied for the permanent role, but wasn’t selected. She left at the end of 2021 to become the elections administrator in Hood County, Texas, as Pinal County searched for applicants for a permanent elections director.

The job drew few applicants.

“Before, when jobs were posted in the elections and recorder’s office, we would have 60 or 70 candidates. Then this year, you had maybe three or four. So there really wasn’t like a huge selection of people to look at,” Ross said.

Overall, 10 people applied, only four of whom had election experience, Daniels, the county spokesman, told Votebeat. One candidate dropped out of the running after accepting another job, and three were interviewed. The county hired Frisk.

The turnover meant the county hadn’t done long-term planning. The office needed to hire new people at a time of increased competitiveness for workers. Some could make more money by working remotely for Maricopa or Pima counties.

Ross has now created a revamped organizational chart with five new positions. That would bring the total number in the department up to 11, including her. The county will fund the positions by reallocating money from the general fund. Some positions could be filled internally, while others may be new hires, Daniels said.

Ross is also working to create more hands-on training for poll workers. She said she found outdated information and typos in the training manual, so it will be rewritten. She’s trying to return calls to people who weren’t getting good communication from the office for the past year.

For Wilson, of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, it’s critical to ensure election workers have gamed out possible scenarios ahead of an election. There should be proper oversight and plenty of checking each other’s work.

“I would just say training, training, training. You cannot train enough for Election Day,” she said.

Who’s to blame? Plenty to go around.

The county hired an outside expert to conduct an administrative review to figure out what caused the problems, how the problems were managed, and what could be done differently going forward. It will be conducted by Brad Nelson, who previously served as elections director in Pima County and, before that, Mohave County.

Some residents said merely putting the blame on David Frisk ignores the broader problems. He should have had oversight and training so he could be successful in his role, they say. The elections director reports to the county manager, who reports to the board.

“They’re making him the scapegoat for their leadership failure,” Gifford said.

Patrick Camunez, the county’s human resources director from 2016 to 2019, said elections employees had come to him with concerns over their pay, workloads, and equipment. The department was neglected by the county, he said. When he tried to raise concerns to county management, he would often hear “that’s just not something the board has an appetite for.”

The election staff “just didn’t feel like they were valued. They didn’t feel like they were listened to. They had brought up personnel issues. … They were kind of falling on deaf ears,” Camunez said.

Since the department was small, it became a “classic case of more and more work and more responsibility” for no additional pay, he said.

“The priority was we wanted to get the tax rate as close to zero as possible,” Camunez said.

Serdy, the supervisor, knows there are lessons to be learned from Pinal’s failures. “I think other counties and other places are watching us, too, so that they don’t make the same mistakes we make. History is important,” he said. “I have a smart TV on right now. And I watch a lot of channels and they’re talking about Pinal County all the time nationwide here lately, and I don’t like it.”

All eyes on Pinal

Before this year, the last time Pinal elections made big news was when the county’s elections warehouse burned to the ground in 2014, just 40 days before the primary election. Ross was recorder then, and the recorder still managed elections.

The county lost all its election equipment. People joked with her, saying that’s what she did to get new equipment.

She handled that crisis. This year’s mess, though, wasn’t caused by a server going up in flames. The systemic problems, and the mounting distrust from the community, will be difficult to overcome. So far, even the most heated commenters commended Ross for stepping in — if anyone can do it, they think it’s her. She knows there’s no room for any more mistakes.

“I pay attention to everything that goes on. I don’t feel that rusty,” she told Votebeat.

The board plans to update the public on progress improving the department at each of its meetings. The outside review should be done in 30-45 days. There’s another big election looming.

Already, the board voted to refund the cities and towns the costs of running the elections the county was contracted to handle — more than $100,000. While seven communities were affected by the first misprinting snafu — including Casa Grande and the City of Maricopa — the remaining communities, including Coolidge, had ballot shortages, Volkmer told the board. No community was unscathed.

Other costs associated with repairing the election are piling up: printing tens of thousands of additional local ballots, an outside administrative review, legal fees, additional staff, more communications to the public.

Skimping, it turns out, carries costs, both in dollars and distrust.

Sharing what went wrong and how it will be fixed is critical to regaining trust from the public after such a damaging series of problems, Securing Democracy’s Rachael Dean Wilson said.

“That is, all your cards on the table, this is what happened. This is where we went wrong. And then show up in the general election in November, and kind of prove to voters that they can pull this off,” she said.

Mike Goodman, the county supervisor who witnessed the polling place frustrations, doubts Pinal County is the only place having these problems, he said during the meeting this week. Every element of elections needs to be analyzed, with complete transparency to the public.

“We should be a poster child for other locations,” he said, “to be looking at what not to do, and start doing what they need to be doing to really straighten out the elections departments across this nation.”

Rachel Leingang is a freelancer for Votebeat and co-founder of the Arizona Agenda. Contact Rachel at rleingang@votebeat.org.

Conservative groups raise money for voter-fraud probes as states ban election grants

2022-08-01T10:23:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Good morning,

It turns out that the much-publicized spate of new state laws banning private grants for elections may have left a route open for private money after all. It flows through law enforcement.

Conservative nonprofit True the Vote has announced it will partner with conservative sheriffs’ groups to fuel investigations into 2020 voter fraud allegations and increase surveillance of voting.

The announcement comes as some sheriffs have embarked on high-profile investigations into the 2020 election that echo debunked allegations of voter fraud, prompting worries that the sheriffs are overstepping their authority and working with activists intent on discrediting the election results.

“A little ironic, don’t you think?” said Neal Kelley, the former registrar of voters in Orange County, Calif. Kelley, who is also a former police officer, now chairs a committee supported by several outside nonprofits that is meant to build stronger relationships between election officials and law enforcement.

“We’ll fund law enforcement with private grants, but you guys [in election offices] can’t touch it, which makes no sense to me,” he said, pointing out that law enforcement at the polls is a sensitive issue because of the potential for voter intimidation.

Obviously, grants to sheriffs to pay for investigations into suspected voter fraud aren’t necessarily covered by laws banning grants for the purposes of election administration. But the public’s discomfort with the potential of private money to influence elections, and the perception that private dollars could sway public officials, could logically extend to grants fueling election-related investigations, too.

“If you’re truly motivated by concerns of partisan actors kind of getting in the space of election integrity, presumably this would cause the same concerns,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “I don’t see a distinction.”

As we’ve written before, election officials across the country accepted millions of dollars in private grants from the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life and other groups to pay pandemic-driven election administration costs in 2020. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, funded the lion’s share of the grants (though former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger awarded millions of dollars via a separate program).

The CTCL grants didn’t have conditions attached to them. The nonprofits awarding the money stressed that Zuckerberg had no direct role in distributing the cash, no election official who applied was turned down, and every jurisdiction got the amount they requested.

Election officials themselves were quick to acknowledge that paying election costs via private grants isn’t ideal, but said the failure of state and federal governments to allocate enough dollars left them few options to deal with 2020’s pandemic-related costs.

Nonetheless, the grants set off a conspiracy theory-fueled backlash, with former President Donald Trump and his allies blaming them for his loss and alleging, without evidence, that the money was earmarked to boost Democratic turnout. That backlash prompted the new laws

Speakers at a panel on elections this week hosted by the America First Policy Institute, a think tank with close ties to Trump, repeatedly went back to the dangers of the CTCL grants, which panelists referred to as “Zuckbucks” or “Zuckerbucks,” and private funding.

“Think of the number of legislatures that after Zuckbucks was exposed that went out and actually passed proactive legislation that said we don’t want private dollars infected in our election systems,” said Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican who in 2020 blocked Louisiana election officials from accepting such grants. Landry’s office didn’t respond to a question from Votebeat about whether Louisiana sheriffs could legally accept the newly announced grants.

Meanwhile, election officials are still struggling to assess what, exactly, is prohibited by the new laws banning private resources. The ACLU’s Lakin and others said they’re concerned about the statutes and what’s restricted under them.

For example, in Virginia, state legislators passed a new law this year that says election officials “shall not solicit, accept, use, or dispose of any money, grants, property, or services.” The sweeping language has left local registrars puzzling over whether seemingly benign longtime partnerships and donations are still allowed, said Brenda Cabrera, the director of elections/general registrar for the city of Fairfax and the current president of the Voter Registrars Association of Virginia.

“As time goes on, we’re discovering more and more things that probably fall into the category of, ‘You can’t do that any more,’” she said, giving examples including volunteers from local Scouting groups offering to help transport supplies or put up and remove signage at polling sites, or donations of pizza or coffee for election workers.

“You’re talking about people who make a career in adhering to laws,” she said, referring to local election officials. “They want to be compliant. They’re very concerned about that. But the letter of this law seems to be far more restrictive than is really logical.”

Chris Piper, the former state elections commissioner for Virginia, said he and the state’s registrars “expressed concern” over some of the language in the new law before it passed. Piper is now chief operating officer of The Elections Group, an elections consulting firm that provides many services and resources to election officials pro bono.

Banning private money in elections isn’t a bad motivation, he said, but has to be balanced with providing proper funding and “the language needs to be carefully crafted so we don’t end up with some of these unintended consequences where election officials actually get no support. That’s not what anybody wants.”

That brings us back to the new initiative from True the Vote, the conservative nonprofit behind the film “2000 Mules,” which claims thousands of so-called “ballot harvesters,” whom the film refers to as “mules,” illegally deposited ballots into drop boxes during the November 2020 election. The film’s allegations, which rely heavily on inconclusive cell phone location data, have been widely debunked.

According to Reuters, True the Vote said the coalition with the sheriffs’ groups is meant to “encourage sheriffs to pursue election-fraud claims,” and also plans to “provide sheriffs with ‘artificial intelligence’ software to assist in analyzing the video they collect,” as well as setting up hotlines to alert sheriffs to suspicious activity related to elections. The organization has said it has raised $100,000 for its sheriffs’ initiatives so far, and hopes to raise $1 million.

One of the groups, Protect America Now, is run by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona. The New York Times reported that when discussing the True the Vote partnership at a recent Arizona rally, Lamb said, “We will not let happen what happened in 2020.”

Sam Oliker-Friedland, executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government, which partners with CTCL on the Election Infrastructure Initiative, pointed out that local sheriffs are typically better funded than local election administrators. In addition, he said, election administration is “one of the most transparent government functions that we have,” and law enforcement is not.

“With private funding of law enforcement you’re really going to be able to pay to have your neighbor investigated in a way that your neighbor can never dig into or learn about, and I think that is in many ways more dangerous,” he said.

Back Then

In 1981, the Republican National Committee coordinated an effort to have armed, off-duty police at polling locations in New Jersey during a gubernatorial election, deterring voters, including many Black and Latino voters. The Democratic National Committee sued, alleging racially discriminatory voter suppression. As a result, the RNC for decades was subject to a consent decree limiting its poll watching efforts; it was lifted in 2018.

Corrections: Last week’s newsletter mistakenly gave incorrect information about how Madison was chosen as the site of this summer’s conference of the National Association of State Election Directors. Madison was chosen by a vote of the NASED executive board from a list of places where elections are not overseen by a secretary of state or lieutenant governor.

In our July 16 newsletter, Jessica Huseman wrote that she would be speaking on a panel at the NASED conference that week. Her panel was organized by the Sector Coordinating Council, in conjunction with the NASED conference.

New From Votebeat

Michigan is one of a handful of states that prints Republican and Democratic candidates on the same primary ballot. But if voters select candidates across party lines during next week’s election, their ballot can’t be accepted — a quirk that confuses voters and could disenfranchise some using mail ballots, Oralandar Brand-Williams reported in her first article for Votebeat Michigan.
Leading up to Michigan’s first major election since the frenzy of 2020 election conspiracy theories, election officials are again holding public events to demonstrate their regular testing of election systems — and again are finding little interest in seeing the technology and the process up close, Brand-Williams reports.

In Other Voting News

A new investigation by Georgia Public Broadcasting and NPR found that more than half the Georgia voters who used drop boxes in the 2020 general election live in one of four metro Atlanta counties where more than half the voters are of color, and that under the state’s new election law, the number of drop boxes in those four counties went from 107 to 25. A quarter of the state’s voters saw their travel time to a drop box increase, the team’s data analysis found.
Conservatives in Georgia are challenging thousands of voter registrations under a new state election law that allows anyone to challenge someone’s eligibility, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Election officials so far have upheld a relatively small number of the challenges, and say existing procedures are enough to ensure voter rolls are up-to-date.
New York City is appealing a Staten Island judge’s decision to strike down a law giving certain noncitizens voting rights in local elections, reports Gothamist. The law would grant voting rights to foreign-born residents who are legally working and living in the city. Opponents argue that the bill violates the state Constitution.
A Kansas appeals court ruled that Secretary of State Scott Schwab violated the Kansas Open Records Act by altering a computer system to disable its ability to produce public records. The appeal is a follow-up to a previous lawsuit in which Secretary Schwab was ordered to turn over provisional ballot reports after Loud Light, a nonprofit, filed a request for the documents.
Republicans are suing over new voting laws in Delaware, reports Delaware Public Media. The bills, which passed despite heavy Republican resistance, allow Delaware residents to register on Election Day and to vote by mail.
The portrait of Latina voting rights activist Adelina Otero-Warren will be stamped onto a U.S quarter this summer. Otero-Warren, of New Mexico, was the first Latina to run for Congress, in 1921, and advocated for Spanish-language classes in the U.S., as well as suffrage for women.
Pennsylvania Republicans are again challenging a mail-in voting law that helped they pass. Act 77 enabled no-excuse mail-in voting in the state. Republican lawmakers are attempting to get the law thrown out on the grounds that a previous ruling allowing undated ballots to be counted invalidates a provision of the law, and thus nullifies the whole statute
Some Republican-led counties are refusing to certify election results, something experts worry could become a way to disrupt democracy and sow doubt about future elections.
Staff departures have forced the temporary closure of Florida’s Monroe County Supervisor of Elections Office, reports Keys Weekly. The office lost three employees and has yet to find replacements, forcing it to close until early voting begins in early August.
Ten Floridians with previous felony convictions are being charged with voter fraud after a government official helped them register. ProPublica reports all were charged with fraud on the grounds that they were ineligible to vote due to failing to pay fines and fees connected to their convictions. Critics of the prosecution say that the official who helped them register did not tell the felons of the required fees, and the charges are an attempt to disenfranchise voters.

Good News Of the Week

By Christian McCann, Votebeat intern

Amid all the news of threats against election officials and staffing shortages, you don’t often hear an election official express the sentiment shared by the clerk of Park County, Wyoming: “I love the job. I like helping where I can help … I just like working with people,” said Colleen Renner. Only part of Renner’s job involves running elections, but this year it’s taking up much of her time. “It was a challenge at first in 2015, but I feel I’ve come a long ways and have improved a lot of things here.”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Unintended downsides possible under bans on private election funding

2022-06-13T10:08:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

A slew of states such as Florida and South Carolina have prohibited local election officials from accepting private donations for elections, leaving election officials around the country in the unenviable position of puzzling out exactly what’s banned. That isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Elections are complicated, and private resources could mean anything from free information technology services for server security to a church donating its use as a polling place. Nonprofits and public-private partnerships help election officials around the country access donated corporate resources, especially related to cybersecurity. The new laws don’t often seem to have been crafted with the intention of prohibiting such things, but some local election officials and groups are warily assessing the specific language in them while consulting lawyers to make sure they comply.

The new bans, of course, are part of the backlash to millions of dollars in private grants for the 2020 election that were primarily funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, but awarded by nonprofits. The grants became a flash point for conspiracy theorists who have falsely said the grants were aimed at defeating former President Donald Trump.

More than a dozen states had banned or restricted election administrators from accepting grants or resources from private organizations as of the end of March, according to Capital Research and NPR. Other states, such as South Carolina, have passed new laws banning the practice since then. They didn’t all use the same legislative language.

In Florida, for example, the law prohibits “any donation in the form of money, grants, property, or personal services from an individual or nongovernmental entity,” although the Florida Supervisors of Elections, which represents local election officials, successfully lobbied for language exempting the donation of polling places from the ban, said Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Marion County. Wilcox said the association, which he headed until last month, has been forced to think about whether the law affects the resources and tools local election officials receive through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “We’re having to expend mental capital on trying to figure some of these things out,” Wilcox said.

Many of the resources offered through CISA come from private companies and include tools such as Microsoft antivirus software. CISA also provides services such as vulnerability assessments. Some technology companies offer free or deeply discounted products and services directly to election offices. Cloudflare, via what it calls the Athenian Project, offers election officials free products that help election websites manage spikes in traffic.

Leigh Ann Acosta, Cloudflare’s director of public relations, said in an email that the company doesn’t believe the recently passed laws “apply to the program, but we are carefully following legal developments.”

Without the partnership with CISA, small election offices would have trouble accessing many sophisticated tools and products, Wilcox said. “None of them would have those services available to them based on their size.”

The new Florida association head, Mark Earley, the supervisor of elections in Leon County, said he is “pretty confident” local election officials can continue accessing resources that come via the federal government and aren’t the kind of direct private funding the law was crafted to prohibit. “I have heard no opinions and no briefings that we couldn’t make use of free resources being administered by CISA or Homeland Security,” he said. “I think that wouldn’t make any sense, frankly.” The Florida secretary of state’s office did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

In South Carolina, the new law prohibits election officials from receiving, accepting, or expending “gifts, donations, or funding from private individuals, corporations, partnerships, trusts, or any third party not provided through ordinary state or county appropriations.”

Asked if the statute prohibits acceptance of the cybersecurity tools and resources coordinated by CISA or donation of polling places — unlike Florida, South Carolina’s statute doesn’t specifically carve those out — Chris Whitmire, a spokesperson for the South Carolina State Election Commission, said, “Our interpretation of this statute is that it is referring solely to funding.” A spokesman for South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said his office has not yet been asked to provide an official interpretation of the statute.

In Kentucky, a spokesperson for Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, said their law, too, does not prohibit nonmonetary contributions.

Meanwhile, at least some nonprofits and private-sector consultants and companies that work with election officials are themselves scrutinizing the new statutes, hoping to avoid putting local officials in a position of accidentally violating them.

Matthew Weil, the director of the Elections Project for the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit think tank that maintains a task force of local election officials to help weigh in on policy and best practices, said some members have grown nervous about participating because of the new laws — in some cases even hesitating to edit a document before checking with the county attorney. That shows how overly cautious election officials are being, he said, adding, “there are some counties that are just really concerned.” Weil said he’s also worried about instances where the think tank pays for the travel expenses to convene election officials to discuss policy.

Weil said lawmakers are responsible for passing clear laws but often don’t, leaving election officials to do their best to follow new rules at a time when they’re under attack. “As soon as someone can benefit from interpreting an overly vague law they’ll do that,” he said.

To that point, election officials across many states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, had to defend against lawsuits challenging their acceptance of the Zuckerberg grants for 2020 election costs, though judges ultimately ruled in their favor.

BPC crafted a statement last month saying the bans on private funding and donated resources “could have serious security ramifications for American elections,” and saying some of the new state laws are vague and overly broad. “The biggest current concern is that prohibitions on in-kind donations, particularly security products from tech companies, could leave election tech exposed. … If these types of tech-based donations are banned, the products could become unaffordable for election officials. Election offices will be left vulnerable to cyberattacks and interruptions in normal operations, which could have dangerous repercussions for our electoral process,” the statement said.

Jennifer Morrell, an elections expert and partner in the Elections Group, an elections consulting firm that provides many services to local officials pro bono, said her firm doesn’t want to do anything that could inadvertently put local election officials in legal jeopardy, “so we’ve been doing our own probing,” looking closely at the new laws and trying to make sense of them.

In fact, Morrell said some of the organizations that have traditionally provided free services may have to consider charging states or counties a fee of some sort In order to comply with the new laws.

In the meantime, election officials are making the best assessments they can, based on the language chosen by lawmakers.

A former state elections official, who requested anonymity because his current job has not cleared him to speak publicly about the matter, said he believes many of the new laws are too vague. “As an elections official, I would have a lot of hesitation in moving forward with accepting grants, accepting contracts that were below market value because they were offering us services because we were critical infrastructure,” the former official said, adding lawmakers have “taken a sledgehammer to something that probably needed a scalpel, policywise.”

As Florida’s Mark Earley put it, “How are you ever sure about anything in today’s litigious world?”

History In The Making

Hi, y’all, Jessica here, just for a second, in what’s normally our “Back Then” section.

We’re skipping our typical long view of voting history to instead talk about this week’s hearing before the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol — the first of several. It is, after all, unprecedented. If there was any doubt that this panel would lay the violent events of that day at the feet of former President Donald Trump, Thursday night’s hearing put an end to that.

“Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee. “And ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.”

Over two hours, the committee presented in-person testimony from a U.S. Capitol police officer and a documentary filmmaker, as well as video testimony from members of the Proud Boys, which allegedly led the charge into the Capitol that day. And crucially, they showed portions of video testimony from members of Trump’s inner circle and explaining that they understoodTrump had lost the election, and had said as much to the man himself.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chairwoman of the committee, said Rep. Scott Perry and “multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.” She didn’t provide details. But there are more hearings to come.

New From Votebeat

Thanks to Republicans, Arizona was an early adopter of voting early by mail without an excuse back in 1991. Now, the GOP is leading the charge to dismantle the very system they helped create, even though it’s wildly popular in the state.

In Other Voting News

The recount in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race didn’t really change the margin of victory for Mehmet Oz over David McCormick, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, reinforcing the accuracy of the original results.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to stay a lower court’s decision to allow the counting of undated mail ballots in a Pennsylvania judicial race, though three justices dissented and said the court should rule in the matter before the November election.
In Wisconsin, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos filled an open seat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission with lawyer Don Millis, a former member. Millis is now one of two Republican members eligible to chair the commission, which oversees elections in the battleground state.
A federal judge ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act. Despite Black voters making up roughly one-third of the state’s population, the map has them as a majority in just one of six districts. The judge said a new map must include at least two majority-minority districts. An appeals court subsequently temporarily stayed the ruling.
State police are investigating breaches of electoral systems in Michigan made by Trump allies attempting to prove claims of fraud in the 2020 election, Reuters reports.
Baltimore has only signed up 900 judges of the roughly 2,000 needed for the July primary. The lack of staff has forced the city to drastically reduce the number of precinct locations, from 296 to 103.
Late election poll worker and Princeton University employee Laura Wooten will have a university building renamed after her in honor of her commitment to public service. Wooten, who died in 2019, is being recognized for 79 years of serving as a poll worker, the longest such tenure in the country.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s story editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

The surprising exception to conspiracy theories about private election grants

2022-04-25T09:15:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

In our last newsletter, we discussed the fervor around banning private grants to election administrators — all centered around grants primarily administered by the Center for Tech and Civic Life and funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, in 2020. Today, let’s discuss how one-sided, unfounded, and myopic the conspiracy truly is.

As we already explained, there is a reasonable argument to be made in favor of banning these types of donations. It would be less than ideal if rich people were able to use their money to dictate how elections are administered. Even the organizations that dispersed Zuckerberg’s money have repeatedly said that, really, they’d prefer a predictable federal funding stream. In fact, Zuckerberg’s already said the grants were a one-time donation meant to address crisis needs during the pandemic and he won’t be continuing them.

None of that seems to matter. Trump and his allies have begun to cite these grants to explain his loss, and these grants have thus become a target in a way that isn’t borne out by the facts.

Let’s take, for example, the new movie from the nonprofit Citizens United, which is headed by Trump ally David Bossie. It’s called “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump.” It centers on the claim that Zuckerberg’s 2020 election spending was meant to boost Democrats’ prospects. The movie says Zuckerberg spent nearly $400 million on “voter operation efforts, particularly in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia.”

But as has repeatedly been reported, the amounts that went to each county were essentially determined by the counties themselves. Every county that applied got funding, and they got the full amounts they asked for. The effort was not targeted at any state, nor was it tailored for any particular voting strategy. Zuckerberg, via a spokesman, has previously said the couple did not participate in determining which jurisdictions should get the grants. It was an infusion of funds, spent at the discretion of the local election officials.

But there was, in fact, a funding campaign that was targeted and did ask counties to spend it in a specific way. The donor: movie star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican and very-popular-man-of-the-internet. Unlike Zuckerberg’s $400 million, Schwarzenegger’s money — which came in at just under $2.5 million — was doled out in response to years of progressive advocacy around polling closures affecting communities of color. He distributed the money only in states that, because of a history of racial discrimination in voting, were formerly required under the Voting Rights Act to seek permission from the Department of Justice for polling place reductions and voting changes. The Supreme Court struck down that requirement in a 2013 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, prompting an outcry. Schwarzenegger said he was spurred by reports of poll closures, and his grants were explicitly earmarked for costs related to in-person polling locations.

“Most people call closing polls voter suppression. Some say it is ‘budgetary.’ What if I made it easy & solved the budgetary issue? How much would it cost to reopen polling places?” he tweeted in September 2020. Three days later, he announced he’d invited nearly 6,000 counties to apply for grants and promised responses “within a week” of applications being submitted. He made good on his pledge, distributing money to counties in Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

So here’s a funding stream that does all of the things Republicans have decried: target specific states in an attempt to have elections administered in the way a rich person wants them to be. For Arnold, that meant paying to expand in-person voting in the middle of a pandemic. Cameron County, Texas, for example, got $250,000 to open two additional voting “supercenters.” They applied on a Friday, and received word they’d get the money the following Monday. The county also got money from CTCL, and the so-called “Zuck Bucks” were not nearly as specific. Those grants were used by counties around the country to shore up almost every aspect of voting, from poll worker pay to new scanners and tabulators. There were no limitations or restrictions.

Still, Zuckerberg’s grant program — not Schwarzenegger’s — led to multiple lawsuits, and is being cited by name as states ban private donations in the future. Surry County, North Carolina, was a rare exception. There, election administrators applied and were approved for more than $63,000 before county officials backtracked and refused to accept the Schwarzenegger funds. They also rejected a smaller grant that had been approved by CTCL. Let me know if there are others like this.

Christian Grose, a political science professor at the University of Southern California who leads the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, which administered the grants, said there are probably a lot of reasons that their grants did not attract the same level of ire. “Well, the ‘Schwarzenegger’ name is different from ‘Zuckerberg,’” he said. “I think that’s part of it.”

And unlike CTCL, the institute is associated with a university, which administered the grants.

“If they did start criticizing and pulling the layers back, what they’d find is students working and learning and election administrators speaking to classes,” he said.

But, of course, there are a few more things: Certainly, Schwarzenegger gave less money to fewer counties. He’s a Republican. Unlike Zuckerberg, he doesn’t run a social media network that conservatives have alleged for years is biased against them. He distributed money specifically for in-person voting, which has drawn less Republican criticism. And maybe, state lawmakers just don’t want to take on the Terminator. Pick your poison.

But really, Grose is just as puzzled about the aggressive stance against Zuck Bucks as anyone. “It’s not like the goals were different [than CTCL’s], but I do think his image and his name make it harder to attack the grants,” he said. “Gov. Schwarzenegger has established himself, in the last several years, as a post-partisan person that works with everyone.”

So, will he … be back?

Unclear. Grose said the institute plans to work with election officials to help them become better advocates for funding, but future grants haven’t yet been discussed.

If the efforts to shut down private funding were being made in good faith, Schwarzenegger should, minimally, be mentioned alongside Zuckerberg — but he hasn’t been. And here’s what that tells us: This is not a serious policy debate about the potential implications of election funding by the wealthy, even though it should be.

Election administrators: Talk to us about these grants. Did you use the 2020 private grant funds to buy equipment new state laws no longer allow you to use? Are new restrictions on private grants causing unanticipated problems or prompting new creative solutions? Please email us at tips@votebeat.org and tell us about it. Votebeat would love to hear from you.

Back Then

Throughout American history the power and privilege of the rich have been a central source of concern in elections. But most of the time, American politicians were worried that the rich might have less influence than they should — not the other way around. This was the justification for property and wealth requirements for the franchise. In New York state in 1821, James Kent — chancellor of New York, the head of the New York Court of Chancery, which was the highest court in the state until 1847 — argued that such requirements were necessary in order to protect “against the caprice of the motley assemblage of paupers, emigrants, journeymen manufacturers, and those undefinable classes of inhabitants which a state and city like ours is calculated to invite. This is not a fancied alarm. Universal suffrage jeopardizes property, and puts it into the power of the poor and the profligate to control the affluent.”

In Other Voting News

Run for Something, a Democratic group, is beginning to recruit candidates to run for local election administration positions in 35 states. The program, which will run for three years, aims to train 5,000 people.
The New York Times is out with a piece on the wedge Trump is driving in Michigan, between loyalists who continue to repeat his false claims about the 2020 elections and Republicans who “are eager to move on.”
South Carolina offered what appeared to be a shining ray of bipartisan agreement when the state Senate unanimously approved early voting in the state. The state House had passed the measure earlier this year. But AP reports the House and governor are now accusing the Senate of a power grab for giving itself the power to confirm gubernatorial appointees to the state elections board, and the legislation may die as a result.
Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Stephen Fowler has a new episode of his excellent podcast series “Battleground: Ballot Box.” This time: How election officials banded together to prevent even more election changes in Georgia from passing. It’s worth your time.
Kim Crockett, a leading Republican candidate for secretary of state in Minnesota is fundraising off of her claims that “socialist” secretary of state candidates shouldn’t be elected because they will have the power to count votes. Except that — oops — the secretary of state is in charge of no such thing.
Not all polling closures are bad! Exhibit A: Dallas County. The county will shut down around 40 lightly frequented polling places to solve staffing shortages and long lines at more heavily used polling locations. Dallas allows you to vote at any polling location in the county, meaning that staff and resources can be redistributed where they make the most sense.
Republicans in the Louisiana House appear to be against even studying the possibility that disabled voters might need additional accommodations, like curbside voting. A bill that would have gathered a group of experts to study the issue faced heavy pushback this week, with Republicans advocating that disabled voters simply get help from non-disabled people instead of being provided accommodations.
Controversial conservative activist Dr. Steven Hotze and co-defendant Mark Anthony Aguirre have been indicted in Houston for “unlawful restraint, a third-degree felony, and aggravated assault, a second-degree felony.” Hotze had hired Aguirre, a former police captain, to investigate ballot fraud. Mistakenly believing a repairman was carrying hundreds of fraudulent ballots in his truck in October 2020, Aguirre ran the man off the road and held him at gunpoint. There were no ballots in the truck, which contained only air conditioning parts and tools.

Infographic of the Week

By Brianna Fisher, Votebeat fellow

As you read in this newsletter recently, Zuckerberg-grant-related conspiracies are gripping Wisconsin. So, this week I decided to illustrate how Madison, Wisconsin, used its grant money as one example.

Republicans in Wisconsin passed legislation to ban such grants, but Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, vetoed it. Where does that leave local election officials in Wisconsin? Celestine Jeffreys, the Green Bay, Wisconsin, city clerk, says that “presently, and in the future, we will fund elections with city-budgeted funds.” So far, Wisconsin lawmakers haven’t announced any plans to increase public funding to make up for those dollars.

Legislators ban private grants for elections yet leave elections underfunded

2022-04-12T00:19:35+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Have you read about the drama in Green Bay, Wisconsin? In short: The mayor’s former (unsuccessful) Republican opponent is leading a recall effort against him, largely because the city accepted grant money from the Center for Tech and Civic Life to pay 2020 election costs. And yes, I know what’s happening in Green Bay — and other places around the country — is weighted down by conspiracies that have been swirling for the past year and a half, and we’ll address that next week. But this week, let’s take a step back and look at the implications for elections and the people responsible for running them.

Green Bay officials’ decision to accept the CTCL money set off controversy from the beginning. In 2020, the conservative Wisconsin Voters Alliance sued to block grants to five major cities in the state, but the judge dismissed their concerns. He wrote that the plaintiff’s argument — essentially that private actors could sway election policy and administration inappropriately if allowed to fund them — was mainly a policy one, and the court couldn’t act unless state legislators banned such grants. “Absent such a prohibition, the Court lacks the authority to enjoin them from accepting such assistance,” the judge wrote.

And so that’s what state legislatures across the country have set out to do, with a vengeance. So far, more than 15 states have banned or restricted election administrators from accepting grants from private organizations, according to Capital Research and NPR, though some governors have vetoed such bills. In several other states, Republican legislators have bills pending.

The cheap conspiracy wrapper has a legitimate concern inside: It is not ideal that one very rich man’s foundation nearly single-handedly financially rescued the 2020 elections. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would have done without it,” Bill Turner, the acting director of voting services in Chester County, Pa., told NPR after the 2020 election.

As courts have repeatedly found, there is no evidence that Mark Zuckerberg had any influence at all in how the money was spent, and every single county who asked for money got the full amount they requested. There was no favoritism, there was no partisan boost. Counties spent the money on election materials like voter education, mail ballot equipment, and personal protective gear.

But what if Mark Zuckerberg had been Mike Lindell? Or Donald Trump? Or any off-the-rack billionaire with a partisan agenda?

It is, on the face of it, a bit surprising that such a thing happened and that there were so few laws regulating it. The grants were, as CTCL would tell you, a desperate move during desperate times — and only after federal and state governments made clear they weren’t stepping up.

“The pandemic was a once-in-a-generation type of emergency for local election officials all across the country. Fortunately, philanthropy helped many election departments make ends meet and support safe and inclusive elections,” CTCL co-founder Tianna Epps-Johnson told Votebeat. “If there is one lesson we take away from 2020, I hope policymakers everywhere have learned that we need to do better to ensure consistent, reliable public funding for election offices so that election departments can better handle whatever challenges come next.”

In other words, an altogether better solution would be for the government itself to appropriately fund the public’s elections.

The obvious problem is that governments are not doing this. So far, none of the states that banned outside funding have come forward with their own election funding. CTCL estimates that states need more than $53 billion (with a b) for election infrastructure updates, technology, and staffing.

In 2020, Congress gave states $400 million to tackle COVID at the polls. Zuckerberg — for context — gave more than $300 million entirely by himself.

His giving didn’t exactly prompt Congress to follow up with new spending. In fact, in 2021, the federal government gave states $0 after dangling (as we reported) $10 billion in funding over 10 years. President Biden has brought that figure back as part of his proposed budget, but that doesn’t mean much — presidents rarely get everything they want, and Congress is under no obligation to do it.

Republicans are already kicking up quite the dust storm over unspent funds dispersed ahead of 2020. Why should we give more money if they haven’t spent what we’ve given them? they ask. That’s a reasonable question if you have no idea how government procurement works, and one presumes Republicans currently within the government actually do. There are rules and an inevitably long procurement process. The county clerk cannot go to Office Depot with her credit card and buy ballot paper. Voting machines are not for sale at Best Buy.

These processes take months and often years and that is exactly the reason — as any elections official will tell you — the public should assure funding well into the future. Election administrators must be able to plan right now for voting machines they need in five years. How can they reasonably do that if they don’t know what their budget will be from one year to the next?

The state legislators driving the bans — whether driven by real concerns about private funding or feverish conspiracy theories about these grants in particular — are ignoring the realities that made them necessary in the first place.

The easiest way to make sure those officials don’t take private money to pay for elections? Make sure they don’t need it.

Back Then

Unlike later presidential commissions on elections — Obama’s Presidential Commission on Election Administration or Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — the Commission on Federal Election Reform co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III was both private and entirely privately funded. Republicans continue to highlight the 2005 recommendations of this commission — which, for example, recommended national voter ID. The commission sought to advance the work of the Help America Vote Act and address the floor-level public confidence in America’s elections following the chaotic 2000 and 2004 elections. Among their less-heralded recommendations? More than a billion dollars in funding for America’s election officials. They didn’t get it.

In Other Voting News

Former President Donald Trump hosted a heck of a party on Tuesday night, complete — the Washington Post reports — with pigs in a blanket, fried shrimp poppers, and conspiracy theories. A gathering of the country’s biggest voter “integrity” activists gathered for a private screening of a 40-minute documentary called “Rigged: The Zuckerberg Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump.”
The conspiracy theorists have not contained themselves to Mar-a-Lago. A group of Trump supporters are encouraging counties to hand-count their ballots, tossing machines for both voting and counting. It’s a terrible idea. You’ll remember we talked about this in the Texas panhandle. Advocates in Cody, Wyoming, are now hot on the trail for paper ballot counting — a move a local activist says will ensure the accuracy of the machine-tabulated vote total. She’s thinking of audits, which the state has already failed to pass.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued his initial report on the 2020 investigation this week, assuring Senate President Karen Fann he had “left no stone unturned.” The 12-page report did not mention Cyber Ninjas and found no evidence of malfeasance. Brnovich alluded to vague mismanagement of early and mailed ballots. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer responded here. Meanwhile, reporter Jeremy Duda (in one of his final pieces for the AZ Mirror) has a warning of actual problems on the horizon in Arizona.
In a 58-page ruling, a federal judge in Montana delivered Democrats a win by temporarily blocking four GOP-backed laws from going into effect. The bills would have halted same-day voter registration, ended paid ballot collection, removed student IDs as acceptable forms of identification at the polls and stopped anyone under the age of 18 from sending in their ballot even if they’d turn 18 by Election Day.
Lawmakers in Georgia have passed a bill giving the Georgia Bureau of Investigation authority to investigate allegations of election fraud. Investigators in the secretary of state’s office already had this job, so it’s not clear what this change will actually do.
Nine people in Alachua County, Fla., have been charged with election crimes and several others are under investigation. A citizen with a history of filing similar complaints brought the names to the county. The charges follow intense confusion in the state after the state’s voters restored felons’ voting rights, only to have the Republican-controlled Legislature pass a bill requiring all restitution and fines to be paid before regaining voter eligibility.
The Maine Legislature has passed a bill that will offer additional protections for election officials. It is on the way to the governor, who is expected to sign it.

Congress gives extra funding to the Pentagon but leaves elections vulnerable

2021-10-23T18:16:09+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Months after Democratic leaders in Congress backed away from providing billions of badly needed dollars to support local election improvements, we now learn that the Senate plans to add the very same amount of money to the Defense Department’s $715 billion budget — even though the Pentagon didn’t ask for it.

You read that right: Congress gave an extra $10 billion to the Pentagon but zero to elections, ignoring multiple warnings and research the past three years emphasizing that America’s crumbling, underfunded election infrastructure presents a national security risk.

It’s not as if the threats to elections are subtle. The last six years have brought us stunning misinformation circulated by hostile foreign nations; direct attacks by those countries on our election infrastructure; a violent insurrection at the Capitol spurred by a former president convinced he is the rightful leader of the country; and continued violent threats to election administrators. Meanwhile, election administrators have been screaming into the wind, trying to convince Congress that Windows 7 is not a sustainable operating system for elections. Anemic election budgets are also to blame for the paperless voting machine problem. Despite a recent push for paper-backed voting, several counties are stuck with paperless systems. That makes them frequent targets of election skeptics, especially amid the intense new attention on audits and claims of hacked machines.

Election security is a war in which America is losing ground. Our generals are our representatives, and county workers are the soldiers, being sent into battle against hostile nation states with broken guns and body armor made of cardboard. The combatants are not the U.S. government versus Russia, or the U.S. government versus China. It is your county clerk versus those massive, well-resourced countries, and our representatives have told them to figure it out on their own.

You would expect Congress to have a beefy justification for withholding this funding. But, the truth is, there isn’t: Nancy Pelosi’s staff told me that her singular reason for nixing that $10 billion was that spending via the reconciliation process provides “no guard rails.” That, in theory, Republican states might spend the money to suppress the vote, rather than support it. I asked for evidence. No one could offer me a single example of a state spending federally apportioned money on restrictive ends. It costs less money, not more, to shut down polling places. In Florida, a clerk has removed nine of the county’s 10 drop boxes due to lack of funding, for example.

The sheer size of the problem should be motivation enough. As participants on any number of Votebeat panels have attested, elections infrastructure is dwindling. From my piece a few weeks ago: “Thousands of counties rely on Windows 7 to run their voting systems — a deeply outdated operating system no longer getting regular security updates. At least 13 states use voting machines purchased before the invention of the iPhone. Thousands of counties relied on privately funded grants distributed by two nonprofits — the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation & Research — for protective equipment during the pandemic and to make long-needed upgrades to their systems.”

As Democrats in Congress often remind us, the pandemic is not over. And as they’d like to forget, next year is an election year. These needs are not diminishing—they are quickly growing. And if Congress wants to prove it’s concerned about national security, even a modest investment in local election administration would protect us against vulnerabilities that even an overfunded Pentagon can’t shore up.

Back Then

After 2000, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, and then the law was signed by a Republican president. That’s a bit hard to imagine now, but it happened. Even though the hanging chads and Brooks Brothers Riot of that year now seem comparatively quaint, it’s still stunning to remember that almost 20 years ago Congress still managed to get something done as it related to elections. That doesn’t mean the states followed through. While states like Florida — which was the most embarrassed by that year’s meltdown — made big changes quickly, many others lagged behind (and some still do). In 2001, watching the same kind of malaise at the state level that is now impacting the federal government, Common Cause President Scott Harshbarger complained, “By looking at what’s happened in state legislatures in the past year, you’d never know that we had a genuine electoral crisis on our hands just a year ago.” That quote could be the title of this newsletter.

In Other Voting News

We never expected anything else, but it’s official anyway: The Democrats’ latest push for voting reform is going nowhere in the Senate. This week Senate Republicans blocked consideration of the Freedom to Vote Act, which had been crafted as a compromise with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. It is unclear where Democrats go from here, but what’s different for the next chapter is that President Biden is now calling for changes to the filibuster rules.
CNN has a good summary of how the Biden DOJ has shifted the department’s course on voting rights. While the Trump DOJ actively avoided voting rights cases or took the position of states that sought to limit rights, the Biden DOJ has moved hard in the other direction.
A new secretary of state has finally been appointed in Texas, and if you’ve been following voting for a while you probably know his name: John Scott. He’s a Fort Worth attorney who has tried several cases related to elections, including — as the Texas Tribune pointed out — a case involving Trump. It’s important to remember that Scott represented Trump in Pennsylvania for only one business day before removing himself. He previously served as a deputy attorney general in Texas and defended the state’s voter ID law in 2014.
Also in Texas news: The House adjourned without taking up the Senate bill that would have forced an audit of the state’s 2020 votes — a bill Trump personally requested. There will be no audit.
Our partners at Bridge Michigan have a story that won’t surprise many who follow the news about Republican secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo: She’s speaking at a QAnon event this weekend in Las Vegas. Karamo denied knowledge that the event was affiliated with QAnon, even after she shared social media imagery laden with QAnon references.
Georgia says it will not investigate claims from True the Vote and the state Republican Party that cellphone location data shows hundreds of cases of illegal ballot harvesting in the 2020 elections. A letter from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation informed the two groups that their evidence “does not rise to the level of probable cause that a crime has been committed.”
And lastly, some shameless self promotion. We co-published the oral history of our beginnings with Poynter this week, a podcast featuring six of the 15 journalists Votebeat hired to cover the 2020 election. We hope you’ll listen.

Why the need for election funding is so dire now

2021-09-13T18:26:24+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Votebeat broke two pieces of news Friday: first, that 14 state election chiefs had written directly to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this week asking for $20 billion in federal election funding, and second, that Democratic legislators designing the budget reconciliation package had originally planned for $10 billion in election funding, dispersed over 10 years—but at the last minute, Pelosi yanked it because, Hill staffers said, she thought the funding would decrease the motivation behind the For the People Act.

Absent some sudden change of heart during the appropriation process this fall, this means election administrators again will be left holding the bag, forcing ancient machines to count votes and depleted staff to work long hours while the Democrats figure out their voting rights strategy. And in the meantime, the environment for the next elections is looking grim. Hostilities against election administrators haven’t stopped, so a bipartisan group of some of the nations’ best election law minds have banded together to create an initiative to provide legal support for administrators, “to help election officials from both parties deal with harassment stemming from Donald Trump’s grievances about the 2020 election and new state laws that restrict their authority,” reports Bloomberg. The Department of Justice has launched an initiative to investigate and address this harassment, but given its scale, that’s going to take some time — even if we assume the feds can make a meaningful impact. Reuters identified 100 threats of violence against these workers. “The response so far: only four known arrests and no convictions.”

Given these challenges, it’s surprising that Pelosi would be so willing to take the funding out of the reconciliation package. She has, after all, praised election officials and spoken out against their harassment. In past years, she excoriated Republicans for not providing appropriate election infrastructure funding. 2021 — multiple election administrators told me — was finally going to be their year. And then, it wasn’t. When I was at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Des Moines a few weeks ago, a lot of the attendees were shell-shocked to see the final version of the budget resolution, announced earlier in the week. One administrator said they were “heartbroken.” Another, a Democrat who’d worked directly with multiple groups on advocating for the funding, said, “I don’t really know where we go from here.”

Pelosi removed the planned spending, according to staffers and officials involved in the talks, because she felt it would take momentum away from the For the People Act, which — as I’ve written before — contains provisions that election officials say they can’t implement given the bill’s tight deadlines and lack of funding. So, while voting rights advocates might be enthused about the dedication Pelosi has shown for this bill, cash-strapped election administrators feel their last, best chance at funding has been thrown in the trash in service of a bill with a snowball’s chance in hell of passage.

Additional challenges to elections abound across the country: The Texas elections bill contains language that election administrators repeatedly asked to change and that will make their jobs needlessly more difficult — for example, a provision requiring voting machines to use CD drives to store vote data (that’s what the language means here) by 2026. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, “forensic audits” have either already started or gotten a heck of a lot of public attention, with almost no attention paid to the county officials’ loud warnings about the lack of reliability of such audits and the clear negative impact on public confidence. At all levels, the voices of election administrators who maintain the franchise have been ignored.

Back Then

Today’s internal party squabbling is not the first time voting advancements have been squandered. Just as the Democratic Party is internally battling over the future of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Bill, Republicans in the 1880s — a time when they were the party of voting rights — messed up an opportunity to meaningfully help elections. At that time, the federal government had essentially given up on federal voting rights enforcement in the South, allowing for mass election fraud by white Southerners and disenfranchisement aimed at keeping Black voters out of the polls. The Federal Elections Bill, written by a faction of Republicans intent on safeguarding the right to vote, would have given courts and appointed supervisors more authority to ensure local jurisdictions followed federal election rules. But another faction of Republicans felt it was too prescriptive, and that policy focus should be directed elsewhere. It never came to a vote in the Senate. In the House, it failed. Not a single Democrat voted for it, and several Republicans broke ranks to vote against it. This split had, in many ways, been bubbling up since Reconstruction. A flank of the Republican Party was committed to civil rights as an ideal, but many were far more focused on issues of economic advancement they felt would eventually win over white voters in the South.

In Other Voting News

Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania began a “forensic audit” Thursday of the state’s 2020 results. As the Philadelphia Inquirer has reported, we have no idea what that means. Republican Sen. Cris Dush said the goal is not to overturn the results of the election (“That horse is out of the barn, as far as this investigation is concerned,” he said.) but instead to see if the system needs improvement. That reasoning is a bit baffling given that Republicans used the same justification this spring to hold 10 hearings aimed at identifying election reforms. House State Government Committee Chair Seth Grove, a Republican, called these hearings “one of, if not the most, comprehensive reviews any state has undertaken.” It remains unclear when Senate Republicans will begin this audit, if they already have, and what they’ll be doing.
North Carolina Republicans have not included $2.8 million in already-distributed federal funding for elections in their proposed budgets for the upcoming year. The feds gave $11.6 million to the state last year in a bipartisan effort to boost election spending during the pandemic. Much of it was spent, but the Board of Elections now must get the Legislature’s approval to use the remaining unspent funds. None of the North Carolina lawmakers would explain their reasoning for the exclusion, and election administrators are now concerned they may lose the funding permanently. “That’s pure politics; there’s no other motive there,” Matt Masterson, a former election security official during the Trump administration, told Carolina Public Press.
A problem that has long plagued Arizona elections might be a distant memory soon, if Arizona Secretary Katie Hobbes can pull off her new plan, but she’s got to get the state’s Republican governor and attorney general on board. Right now, if you cast an out-of-precinct provisional ballot in Arizona, the entire ballot is rejected. Hobbes’ proposal would require those ballots to be partially accepted. For any race on the ballot that the voter was legally eligible cast a vote for (such as a statewide race) that vote would be counted; for races in which they should not have cast a ballot (for example, a city council district they do not live in), the vote wouldn’t be.
Three activist organizations in Montana have filed a lawsuit against the state, saying that a series of bills signed into law in the last year represent a “cocktail of new voter suppression measures.” The groups say that many of the features of the bills passed this year target youth voters specifically: Student ID must now be augmented with a second ID when voting, and ballots are no longer mailed to voters who have not yet turned 18 but would by election day. The groups — Montana Youth Action, Forward Montana Foundation, and the Montana Public Interest Research Group — say that the provisions will have a negative impact “on the ability of Montana youth to remain active and engaged participants in democracy.”
In Colorado, Mesa County Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley has been charged with felony burglary and misdemeanor cybercrime, for allegedly entering the county clerk’s office without authorization and attempting to steal documents. Her boss, County Clerk Tina Peters, is the subject of separate investigations involving the illegal sharing of images and passwords from the Mesa County voting system with conspiracy theorists. The Colorado secretary of state has sued to remove Peters from her duties as chief election official, but Peters cannot be placed on leave because she is an elected official. Knisley, who is accused of intimidating office employees and telling them not to cooperate with the investigations into Peters, is not an elected official and was placed on leave on Aug. 23. She turned herself in to authorities on Sept. 1 after she entered the office and attempted to log into Peters’ computer with her credentials to print documents, unsuccessfully.
Early voting for California’s recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom is under way. And leading up to Tuesday’s final day of voting, the California Republican Party has wasted no time making baseless claims of voter fraud — even rolling out a spot on its website to make reports. CalMatters has an excellent explainer separating fact from fiction.
ProPublica has an eye-opening report about the far right’s “precinct strategy,” which has gained momentum this year thanks to Steve Bannon’s vocal promotion. By securing leadership positions in the GOP’s county and precinct apparatus, Trump loyalists aim to take control of election administration from the ground up. In 41 of the politically competitive counties ProPublica studied, reporters found a surge of 8,500 new Republicans had signed up as precinct officers, with clusters in Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
In New Jersey, the Atlantic County Board of Elections may have to move “scanning equipment, office furniture and more than 140,000 paper ballots cast in the 2020 election” out of its rented warehouse because of the landlord’s $100,000 in unpaid electric bills. The board of elections rented the warehouse to store the additional equipment necessary to ramp up vote by mail during the pandemic, and officials had intended to use it again during the upcoming general election. The county has asked the electricity company to consider keeping the power on through the end of the year.
A U.S. district judge verbally slapped down Lin Wood and Sydney Powell in a ruling a few weeks ago, calling their lawsuits related to voter fraud in 2020 an abuse of the court’s role and requiring them to pay the associated fees. Now, Wood and Powell have been presented with a bill for Michigan’s legal fees: $204,000. Per the AP: “Detroit was represented by lawyers in private practice. They’re seeking $182,000. The Michigan attorney general’s office is requesting about $22,000.”

Good Idea of the Week

I still require more hobbyist submissions so that we can continue to feature what election folks do in their downtime. Please send me your hobbies!

In the meantime, I come to highlight a good idea: Josh Daniels, the clerk in Utah County (home to Provo), hosted an election-transparency night this week because of an “influx” in public records requests associated with the election. “Election officials are under more scrutiny than ever before,” Daniels told KUER. “They’re being asked questions they’ve never been asked before. There’s public records requests that are at an all-time high. So [we’re] just trying to be proactive and host an event like [this] to get out ahead of it and share what we do and answer questions.” He answered questions about the county’s system, and attendees were allowed to interact with the voting technology used by the state.

One 18-year-old voter at the event said, “I think everyone is reasonably suspicious when you put a paper in the mail and then it gets counted for an election, but the discussion tonight was illustrative of all the work and expertise that goes into the process, which helped me.”

Secretaries of state implore Pelosi for federal election funding

2021-09-10T11:07:00+00:00

Fourteen secretaries of state and chief election officials implored House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a letter Wednesday to include $20 billion in the federal budget for election funding over the next 10 years. The letter is the latest plea from election administrators who just weeks ago endured a major setback in their push for new election assistance.

“We know that the challenges before you are great, and that difficult prioritization decisions must be made. But we want to be sure you know how acute our needs are,” they wrote, citing voting machines that require urgent replacement, threats to the safety of election officials, and budgets decimated by the pandemic.

These state officials, all Democrats, along with dozens of bipartisan county officials across the country have spent months asking congressional leaders to prioritize this funding.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who signed the letter, told Votebeat “a sustainable source of federal funding, especially in light of ever evolving security threats” was necessary to ensure the security of elections. Maine’s voter registration system, which serves almost 500 municipalities who all independently access the platform, was built in 2007. “It’s 14 years old, and it’s fundamental to everything we do,” she said. “There are, obviously, limitations on its utility and I think it’s a vulnerability in the future. Fortunately, it’s served us well to date, but we desperately need to make those investments.”

The letter’s urgency demonstrates the reality for election administrators, who say they have been left holding the bag in the most divisive time for elections in modern history. The crumbling state of America’s voting machines, physical storage facilities, security standards, and audit practices have made repeated front page and chyron-grabbing news since the pandemic. Thousands of counties rely on Windows 7 to run their voting systems — a deeply outdated operating system no longer getting regular security updates. At least 13 states use voting machines purchased before the invention of the iPhone. Thousands of counties relied on privately funded grants distributed by two nonprofits — the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation & Research — for protective equipment during the pandemic and to make long-needed upgrades to their systems. They also spent this money, and far more, on vote-by-mail equipment and staffing needs to accommodate voting in a pandemic.

State and local election officials have been asking for a consistent stream of federal funding for decades, but one has never come. Given the year’s clear focus on voting rights as a policy priority for Democrats, who now hold the White House and both chambers of Congress, these officials felt 2021 would finally be the year their effort would bear fruit. Instead, what they’re feeling is painful whiplash.

Many of the officials who signed the letter thought they’d already won their requested federal funding earlier this summer. For weeks leading up to the announcement of Senate Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget resolution on Aug. 9, multiple legislators had told them that the resolution would include billions of dollars in election funding alongside the bill’s major priorities such as expanded education funding, climate change solutions, and workforce investment. Instead, elections received $0.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had abruptly changed her mind about election funding days before the announcement. Senators then removed the funding at her direct urging to keep the House and Senate priorities aligned. Any funding for election infrastructure, she told them, would reduce the urgency around the For the People Act.

“I thought it was a done deal,” one state election official said, declining to be named so that he would not fall out of favor with congressional leaders. He said he was “heartbroken” when he saw the news. “I know that sounds crazy, but this was the first time the federal government was supposed to offer predictable funding to elections and now it’s just gone.”

The predictability is critical to the improvement of election infrastructure in the long term, said Tiana Epps-Johnson, co-founder of the Center for Tech and Civic Life. She said that in order for counties to offer consistently positive voting experiences, and to attract more participation, local governments must plan investments long into the future. “Concretely, that planning means election officials can proactively communicate how to navigate their communities so that everyone is invited in,” she said.

Cathy Darling Allen is the clerk in Shasta County, Calif. — a predominantly Republican, Northern California county where she serves as an elected Democrat. She began working in elections in 2003, and has been asking for federal funding since that time. She felt deflated to see the Democratic Party change course on what was widely viewed to be the last, best chance for funding this year.

“Elections is kind of the red-headed stepchild, and it always has been,” she said. She’s watched her own staff and colleagues across the country be threatened with their lives as they tried to hold an election in extraordinary circumstances with limited resources. “None of us signed up to be law enforcement officers. We didn’t sign up to risk our lives,” she said. The dire nature of the depleting resources and increasing distrust has, she said, “not sunk in with our representatives in Washington.”

Election officials began to feel they had clinched the funding in the reconciliation package on Aug. 5, when Politico published a story foreshadowing the Democrats’ plans. Including it in the reconciliation package, the authors wrote, might be “the only realistic opportunity for congressional Democrats to do something concrete on voting ahead of next fall’s midterms.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar had been advocating for the funding to be included in the package for months, as had Rep. Steny Hoyer in his chamber, Politico reported and Votebeat has independently confirmed. There were no signs of problems until days before the bill’s contents were finalized.

Pelosi’s decision, according to participants in the negotiations, was heavily influenced by Rep. John Sarbanes, the author of the For the People Act. Sarbanes and his aides convinced Pelosi that providing the funding now would compromise their remaining leverage over Senate Democrats to force passage of the act, said people involved in the discussion, including several House and Senate senior staff and state elections officials.

Pelosi’s publicly stated reason for opposing the funding in the budget reconciliation is that Congress then cannot control how a state may spend the money, according to her spokesman Drew Hammill, who said she is concerned that when providing that money without guardrails, “any governor could use it to suppress the vote.” Others who have spoken with Pelosi and Sarbanes say they believe any election funding should be withheld until the passage of the For the People Act.

Advocates and experts say Pelosi’s plan represents an unrealistic level of optimism for the bill’s future, which currently has no viable path forward without meeting Sen. Joe Manchin’s demands for scaling it down — a rewrite that is still in the works. Both Pelosi and Sarbanes have vocally opposed breaking up the bill or removing any of its many provisions, say staffers and advocates with whom they’ve spoken.

Klobuchar, who received no warning of Pelosi’s sudden decision, was angered and shocked, according to multiple people who talked to her. In reaction, Klobuchar repurposed her election-funding plan — which offered $10 billion to state and local officials, available over a decade — into an amendment to the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The amendment, which wasn’t voted on, was a symbolic move to show her displeasure with Pelosi’s decision and an assurance to local election administrators that their voices were still being heard, one Democratic Hill staffer told Votebeat. “Klobuchar is trying to live in reality,” the staffer said. “She’s just trying to do something.”

Hammill, the Pelosi spokesman, told Votebeat that a plan of the type Klobuchar advocated was “not fully baked.” The reconciliation package, he said, was not “the appropriate vehicle” to distribute funds because under reconciliation rules, Congress cannot dictate specifically how the funds are used. “We support this funding, but it has to have safeguards,” he said. “And what was proposed does not.”

Pushed to explain the basis for Pelosi’s concern, Hammill said, “Governors can use the funds to do things that are not in furtherance of our democracy.” As an example, Hammill said, “Nothing would stop a governor, such as the governor of Texas, from using the funds to remove mail-in ballot boxes, drop-off boxes.” (Texas does not have drop boxes.)

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Rep. Sarbanes wrote, “Mr. Sarbanes has supported and continues to support much needed election infrastructure funding with important safeguards.”

Pelosi and Sarbanes have made this insistence about safeguards to advocates and state officials for months. Matt Masterson, the former chair of the Election Assistance Commission, the agency responsible for distribution of such funds, said it is false to suggest federal dollars given to states and counties to spend on election infrastructure are misspent. After all, it costs far less money to close polling locations and remove drop boxes, and state legislatures across the country have been doing this without any additional spending since the 2020 election. The EAC has, for nearly two decades, distributed this money without finding a pattern of the behavior Hammill describes.

“In fact, the surest way to guarantee voters will no longer have the options or access they are used to is to worry more about guardrails you desire than the resources officials desperately need,” he said. “After what election officials went through in 2020, there is absolutely no excuse not to invest in them. Failing to support them because you don’t trust them completely ignores their history of responsibly spending money to serve voters and protect their systems.”

Hammill said Pelosi’s preference was to apportion money to states and local offices in the normal appropriations process following the passage of the For the People Act. He said Pelosi and the other supporters of the bill had every intention of ensuring states have the money they need to make the specific changes authorized by the bill. But there is, history shows, no guarantee of sufficient funding after the passage of voting bills. Election offices often suffer the consequences of poorly funded legislative requirements even decades later.

Epps-Johnson of CTCL says that counties were so desperate for funding in 2020 that dozens described even the purchase of basic supplies as revelations. The combination of creative work on behalf of election officials alongside last-minute federal and private grants made 2020 a success against all odds, and Epps-Johnson called this “a miracle, given the outdated systems they are using to do that work.” She said that even after her years of experience in elections she was surprised at how small some unmet needs were. “We even heard from one local election department in Texas with about 1,200 voters, which was able to purchase ‘Vote Here’ signs and ‘I Voted’ stickers for the very first time,” she said.

As it has become clear to nonprofit groups and election workers that the federal government is unlikely to provide a new, consistent stream of funds, they are left to grapple for dwindling resources from their counties and states, which have so far expressed similar lack of interest in paying for election upgrades.

Darling Allen, the clerk in Northern California, said she must “go toe to toe at budget hearings with law enforcement” over county dollars — a fight she rarely wins. “Our voters are very clear in our community that they prize law enforcement and public safety above all else,” she said. The federal support “would have provided a baseline of ongoing maintenance funding we could have counted on in the local level that would have given us some shelter from things like budget cuts and economic downturns that we have no control over.”

“There are so many opportunities to fund elections, and the infrastructure and reconciliation packages were two of the clearest shots,” said Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Trump administration, who has long advocated for large increases in funding on election infrastructure.

With Pelosi and Sarbanes apparently intending to, as one House staffer put it, “hold election funding hostage” pending the passage of the For the People Act, there is currently no obvious path forward for a large infusion of funds for election infrastructure this year. While Pelosi’s office and other Democrats have said they will strive to provide such funding ahead of 2022’s federal midterms, local election officials are left to manage local elections happening nearly every day across the country with the resources they have now.

“One of the most exciting things to come out of the 2020 election is that local election officials are increasingly finding their voice and stepping up to talk about the realities of what administering elections look like on a daily basis,” said Epps-Johnson. She is hopeful that their ability to describe their circumstances and advocate for themselves will lead to “us closer to the Democracy we say we are about.”

None of the staffers or representatives across nine House and Senate offices Votebeat spoke with could articulate a clear vision for implementing funding now that Pelosi has determined to wait until the Senate’s passage of the For the People Act to loosen the purse strings. Democratic senators and staffers have expressed public doubt at their ability to do so for months, and little has changed.

“There is a lot of work to do to educate lawmakers and the American public about what it takes to run elections that Americans actually deserve,” Epps-Johnson said. “There is still a learning curve we need to tackle in order to shine light on these fundamentals of our system, which could be bolstered in a way that gets us closer to the Democracy we say we are about.”

State, local officials push Congress to include $20 billion for elections in infrastructure funding

2021-06-28T20:45:00+00:00

A bipartisan group of more than 300 state and local election administrators — ranging from Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenny to Broward County, Fla., Elections Supervisor Joe Scott — have asked Congress to include a large boost for election funding to its infrastructure package.

But the ask, for $20 billion over 10 years, comes a few days after the Biden administration proudly announced it had “made a deal” with a crucial group of Democratic and Republican senators, landing on a roughly $1 trillion package after weeks of frustrating, stop-start negotiations.

Election advocates with knowledge of the infrastructure negotiations say it isn’t too late to get their desired funding, even if it doesn’t come in the current package. They say specifics will be announced in the coming weeks. Spokespersons for the Senate and House appropriations did not immediately respond to requests for comments about the election-funding push.*

The officials’ letters, advance copies of which were released exclusively to Votebeat, were signed by groups of state and local elections officials, comprising 10 secretaries of state, 50 mayors, and 250 local elections officials. They reflect significant agreement from all ranks of government that elections infrastructure has been critically underfunded for decades:

> “This federal funding would give local and state election offices the ability to replace outdated equipment, upgrade voter registration and election management systems, invest in physical, technological, and security infrastructure, and other essential needs. The ten-year investment would ensure that election officials will be able to plan ahead and continue to execute the most secure, accurate, and accessible elections for eligible voters for years to come.”

It surprised many experts and onlookers that none of the multiple versions of the infrastructure package thus far has included a significant funding infusion for elections, which have been considered “critical infrastructure” under a move made in the waning days of the Obama administration in January 2017.

“If you don’t think about election administration day in and day out as we do, you may not realize that the systems, equipment, and facilities we need to administer our country’s elections are infrastructure,” the local and state election administrators wrote in today’s letter. “Challenges have only grown in recent years—from safeguarding databases from bad actors to maintaining equipment that is growing more and more outdated. And as with most challenges our communities face, the pandemic only added to the problem.”

The 2017 designation gave elections special consideration as a national security measure but also specifically labels elections as “infrastructure” so that they can be considered for federal infrastructure projects. In the designation, the Obama administration wrote that firming up election infrastructure “is vital to our national interests, and cyberattacks on this country are becoming more sophisticated, and bad cyber actors – ranging from nation-states, cybercriminals and hacktivists – are becoming more sophisticated and dangerous.”

Since that designation was issued, Congress has passed hundreds of millions in funding to states for election upgrades — first after the cyber intrusions of 2016 and then in preparation for changes necessitated by the COVID pandemic ahead of 2020. But there has not been a firm commitment to consistent and predictable funding since Congress first began issuing large sums of grant money after the 2000 election. This, the letter-signers say, would change the game for election administrators across the country.

“Those who are closest to making our elections work are sending a clear message that now is the time for Congress to properly fund the critical election infrastructure that is the foundation of our democracy. Doing so will create budget certainty for election officials and set them, and voters, up for success, whatever challenges may come next,” said Tiana Epps-Johnson, executive director for the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which helped organize the letter signing campaign.

“Just as investing in roads, bridges, and broadband is vital to our country, so is investing in the security and modernization of our elections,” read the letter signed by the group of mayors, including Mayor Kate Gallego of Phoenix, whose city has been overtaken by news of Cyber Ninjas’ ongoing “forensic audit” of Maricopa County’s ballots and machines. “We strongly urge you to include funding for secure elections in the infrastructure package.”

*Correction, 11:45 p.m.: This article has been updated to make clear that the letter-signers may pursue election funding in a future infrastructure bill rather than the bipartisan package currently under Senate consideration.