Author: digital

The rule, which was pushed by nationally prominent election deniers, only changed in minor ways between being voted down in May and approved in August. Those adjustments made it even less compliant with existing law, experts say.

by Doug Bock Clark Aug. 27, 5 a.m. EDT

The members of the Georgia State Election Board could not have been clearer. Back in May, four of them voted down a proposed rule that would have given county election boards a new way to delay or reject election results, which could throw the November vote count into chaos.

“You run counter to both the federal and the state law,” said Ed Lindsey, a Republican board member and attorney who practices election law, to the woman who proposed the rule.

This rule “violates federal law. It also violates state law,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, the board’s lone Democrat.

“It’s just not ready for prime time yet,” said the board chairman, noting that it needed more work to ensure its legality.

Even the lone board member supporting the rule, Janice Johnston, a retired obstetrician who had made unvalidated claims about falsified vote tallies in Fulton County, voted against it. The fifth board member did not vote. The board agreed that two members would work on improvements to the rule.

Three months later, a new draft of the rule came back for a vote. This time, it passed 3-2.

How much did the rule change between drafts? A review by ProPublica shows: hardly at all. In fact, election law experts told ProPublica that the small changes made the rule even less compliant with existing law.

The rule dramatically expands the authority of county officials overseeing the usually mundane task of certifying elections. The passage of it was enabled by nationally prominent election deniers and the Georgia Legislature. And the board members who passed it were cheered on by former President Donald Trump. It comes at a time when Trump and his allies are already calling into question the fairness of the elections process and making preparations to contest the results — and as Trump slips behind Vice President Kamala Harris in swing state polls.

It’s no coincidence that Trump allies are expanding their powers over certification in Georgia, a state where Biden beat Trump in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Weeks after that election, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to “find” him those winning votes. Raffensperger refused. Since then, the Legislature has made numerous moves to exert more control over the state’s elections.

In the 2021 legislative session, lawmakers stripped Raffensperger of his spot as the designated chair of the State Election Board. Instead, they gave themselves the power to appoint the chair, unless they were out of session, in which case the governor could do it. (Though they could replace that chair once they were back in session.)

Another of their changes came this past May, after Lindsey, the Republican board member who had called the rule illegal, was pressured to resign. The Republican speaker of the House replaced him with Janelle King, the former deputy state director for the Georgia Republican Party and a conservative media personality, who has no experience in election administration and who had tweeted “I have questions!!” about the results of the 2020 election.

With King, the board became stacked with a majority of members who had questioned the results of the 2020 election. In early August, Trump praised all three by name during an Atlanta rally, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”

Meanwhile, the proponents of the rule — including Bridget Thorne, a Republican Fulton County commissioner who calls herself the rule’s “originator” — decided to resubmit it. Thorne told ProPublica that claims of the rule’s illegality were an attempt to “scare” her. “I went and I talked to the lawmakers,” she said, “and they didn’t see anything wrong with my rules.”

Thorne said she got advice and support on the revised rule from Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation lawyer who has led efforts for stricter voting laws nationwide for decades; Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and the chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, a group advocating for Republican priorities in election law; and Cleta Mitchell, the head of the Election Integrity Network, a nationwide organization that has challenged the legitimacy of American elections, which secretly backed the submission of the rule. Mitchell had joined Trump on the call in which he asked for Raffensperger to find him votes.

Mitchell, von Spakovsky and Cuccinelli did not respond to requests for comment.

The resubmitted rule only changed in minor ways between being voted down in May and approved in August. Those changes did not fix its legal problems, according to five election law experts who spoke with ProPublica. In fact, they said, in some ways it made them worse.

At the heart of legal experts’ critiques of the rule is its assertion that officials have the discretion to delay certification, even though more than a century of Georgia case law and judicial history says otherwise.

“If the State Election Board decided that the first rule was outside the role of their authority, I think the second rule is even more outside the scope of their authority,” said Caitlin May, a voting rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.

The only substantial addition was a new paragraph that gives county election boards the power to determine “a method to compute the votes justly” if they discover any error or fraud, while also requiring that a board report fraud to the district attorney. Legal experts worried that some conservative county boards might interpret this as permission to adjust vote counts they perceived as tainted, given that the rule doesn’t define what it means to “compute the votes justly.”

Georgia law states, “If any error or fraud is discovered, the superintendent shall compute and certify the votes justly, regardless of any fraudulent or erroneous returns presented to him or her.” (Italics added by ProPublica.)

Peter Simmons, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections, said that by dropping “and certify” from the rule, its meaning has arguably been reversed. Instead of emphasizing that certification is a mandatory duty regardless of any fraud or errors, the rule tries to grant county election board members discretion not to certify by leaving out the language that they “compute and certify,” according to Simmons.

“This rule’s slight change in wording from the statute could have significant effects” and could “jeopardize Georgia’s ability to comply with the federal certification deadline,” Simmons said.

There also was a minor adjustment to the May version of the rule, which would have required that county boards meet on 3 p.m. the Thursday after the election to investigate potential errors. After criticism from Georgia election officials, among others, that the timing of such a meeting was well ahead of the 5 p.m. Friday deadline for counting provisional ballots, the August version of the rule moved the timing to 3 p.m. on Friday. But experts warned that the later timing still could cause provisional ballots to be missed.

Johnston had voted against the rule in May and for it in August. She was joined by Rick Jeffares, who did not cast a vote in May, and King.

In the August meeting at which the vote was held, Johnston argued that certification should be discretionary not mandatory, but she offered little explanation of her reasoning for supporting it after she previously voted it down, except to say that the change to the timing of the investigatory meeting had eased her concerns.

When asked why she had changed her vote, Johnston emailed ProPublica, “The small changes were appropriate.”

Jeffares and King did not respond to requests for comment.

Source

The Democratic Party of Georgia, with the support of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, is asking a judge to weigh in on Georgia’s new rules for certifying election results.

“County officials across Georgia have already sought to block or delay certification after recent elections, and the amended rules give them new tools to try again,” wrote the petitioners.

The Democratic National Committee and several Democratic local election board members and state lawmakers also joined in the lawsuit, which was filed Monday in Fulton County Superior Court.

This month, the three Republican members of the State Election Board voted to approve new rules that could result in some local election board members declining to certify election results.

One rule specifies that if local election board members identify discrepancies, “no votes shall be counted from that precinct,” pending investigation. If board members identify an error they deem cannot be corrected, the board “shall determine a method to compute the votes justly.”

Most legal experts agree that local election boards do not have this discretion under Georgia law.

The petitioners are asking the court to declare that certifying election results is a mandatory duty, that election superintendents must certify the Nov. 5 election results no later than 5 p.m. on Nov. 12 and to block enforcement of the new rules if the court finds they are inconsistent with those tenets. 

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has criticized the new rules and made clear that certification must be complete by Nov. 12 to comply with Georgia law.

“Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” he wrote in a recent statement.

The three Republicans appointees on the five-member State Election Board have faced growing scrutiny for actions this summer, including approving several sweeping rule changes with little time to spare before early voting begins. Former President Donald Trump praised the members by name at a recent rally in Atlanta, calling them “pitbulls fight for honesty, transparency and victory.”

The trio are also facing several ethics complaints calling for the removal of the three Republican board members, which are under review by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. The governor’s office says it is awaiting the guidance of the attorney general. Typically, the governor is charged with referring these cases to a state administrative court for review.

“We need the governor and Republican leadership to step up, to be the adults in the room, to call out these extremists and tell them what they are doing is wrong and if they want their candidate to win, he needs to win fair and square,” Democratic State Rep. Saira Draper said at a Monday news conference.

The new rules have also been criticized by the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, which called on the board to halt their implementation.

In a statement, Quentin Fulks, Harris-Walz principal deputy campaign manager, wrote that Republicans in Georgia have been laying the groundwork to challenge election results this fall.

“A few unelected extremists can’t just decide not to count your vote,” Fulks wrote.

Fulks added that the Democrats will win this case “and keep fighting so that every eligible voter can confidently cast their vote knowing it will count.” 

Janelle King, a Republican state board member, told WABE on Monday that she has “100% confidence” that her actions have been legally and ethically sound.

The state Republican party also blasted calls to remove the GOP appointees.

“In no way do these rule changes interfere with anyone’s right to vote or cause undue burdens on election workers,” Georgia Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon wrote in a statement, affirming that the party leadership stands by the Republican members.

Several local election board members have already declined to certify primary elections this spring. 

Attempts to stop the certification of election results, citing baseless claims of widespread election fraud, have been halted by the courts or state officials in other swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona. But election experts worry that the attempts can harm voter confidence.

“Even if these refusals aren’t successful, each time someone refuses to certify or disrupt certification, it increases distrust when false information is already fueling things like threats and harassment against election officials,” said Lauren Miller Karalunas, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The State Election Board is set to consider additional rule changes at a meeting in late September, a few weeks before early voting begins. 

Source

By The Associated Press

Published: Aug. 16, 2024 at 12:17 PM CDT

ATLANTA (AP) — An election board in one of Georgia’s largest counties has voted to start charging people who challenge the eligibility of voters for the cost of notifying the challenged voters.

The Cobb County Board of Elections and Registrations voted 4-1 on Tuesday to adopt the rule. Debbie Fisher, a Republican member of the board, was the only vote against the rule.

Republican activists are challenging thousands of voters in Georgia as part a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to take names off voting rolls. Most of the people they are targeting have moved away from their old address, and the activists argue that letting those names stay on the rolls invites fraud. But Democrats and liberal voting rights activists argue Republicans are challenging voters either to remove Democrats or to sow doubt about the accuracy of elections in advance of 2024 presidential voting.

Democrats have been pushing to start charging for each challenge filed, in part as an effort to deter people from targeting hundred or thousands of voters using software programs such as EagleAI or IV3 that facilitate mass challenges. A 2021 Georgia law specifically says one person can challenge an unlimited number of voters in their own county.

In suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County, a onetime Republican bastion that now produces Democratic majorities, the board voted only to charge for the cost of printing the challenge notice and for postage to mail it, likely to be less than a dollar per challenge. But that could add up. Cobb County Elections Director Tate Fall has estimated that it cost about $1,600 to mail out notices from one batch of 2,472 challenges filed last month.

Democrats have also wanted counties to charge challengers for staff time to research and process challenges. But Daniel White, a lawyer for the board, said Tuesday that he concluded that the board couldn’t do that unless state law is changed to grant specific authorization. However, he said he concluded the board has the inherent power to charge for sending notices, in the same way a court has the inherent power to charge someone for serving notice of a lawsuit on the defendants.

“If you’re talking about 3,000 voters being challenged and notice having to go out to 3,000 voters being challenged, that really increases your costs,” White said.

But Republicans opposed the measure. Fisher called it “egregious” and “just wrong” to charge people for exercising their challenge rights.

Cobb County Republican Party Chairwoman Salleigh Grubbs said the board is failing to do its job of ensuring clean voter rolls, while challengers are stepping in to help.

“When the Board of Elections is trying to charge people for doing the job they should be doing, that’s a disgrace,” Grubbs said.

The board also adopted other rules around challenges, saying it won’t accept challenges against people who have already been moved to the inactive voter list. For people who have moved, federal law says Georgia can only cancel an inactive registration if a voter doesn’t respond to a mailing and then doesn’t vote in two following federal general elections. That process takes years. Challengers have been targeting inactive voters for quicker removal.

Counties are making rules in part because the state hasn’t issued guidelines to counties on handling challenges. That’s leading to differences in how counties handle the same types of challenges.

An Associated Press survey of Georgia’s 40 largest counties found more than 18,000 voters were challenged in 2023 and 2024, although counties rejected most challenges. Hundreds of thousands more were challenged in 2020, 2021 and 2022.

A new law that took effect July 1 could lead to a surge in challenges by making it easier for challengers to meet the legal burden to remove someone. Some groups have sued to block the Georgia measure, arguing it violates federal law.

Source

• Mark Niesse – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (TNS)
• Aug 2, 2024 Updated Aug 6, 2024

ATLANTA — The creation of a Georgia website for voters to cancel their registrations this week initially disclosed personal information and quickly led to fears that it could be exploited if wrongdoers attempt to remove legitimate voters.

The secretary of state’s office plugged the data leak and said the site includes safeguards to prevent wrongful voter cancellations while keeping voter lists up to date.

The election-year launch of a voter cancellation website became a flash point among liberal voting rights groups worried that it could be misused, conservatives who want to prevent potential illegal voting, and election security advocates concerned about voting technology.

“The website makes it very easy to challenge anyone’s voter registration status,” said Tamieka Atkins, executive director of ProGeorgia, a left-leaning organization focused on voting access. “It could be anyone behind the computer filling this out. We can hope that it won’t be abused, but I don’t know if it’s smart to put our elections on hope.”

Few cases of illegal out-of-state voting have ever been proved in Georgia.

The website requires voters to provide basic information, such as their name and birth date, along with a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number — the same personal information that was briefly available when the website went live Monday.

A programming error displayed the private information through a link to a computer-generated voter cancellation form that was supposed to only be viewable by county election officials, said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. About 25 people got to the point on the website where they could have seen personal information before the issue was corrected, Sterling said.

“The goal is cleaner voter lists and a more secure way to cancel your registration than through the mail or email,” he said. “It can lower voter registration challenges coming into counties and get rid of issues caused by human errors.”

The site doesn’t automatically cancel voter registrations. Instead, it creates an online way to send cancellation requests to county election offices, where workers are trained to scrutinize voter information before they remove registrations, Sterling said.

Attempts to cancel multiple voters at once would raise a red flag and wouldn’t be processed without verification, Sterling said. Whenever a registration is canceled, county election offices mail a confirmation letter, and voters can re-register if needed or cast a provisional ballot. Election officials could also reinstate voters who were canceled in error, he said.

The secretary of state’s office is examining additional ways to ensure that cancellation requests won’t negatively affect legitimate voters, including the possibility of limiting the website’s usage at times, such as during the weeks before an election, Sterling said.

“We’ve done everything we can to mitigate the risks,” Sterling said. “I know this is a heightened environment, but we have to be willing to move into a digital age. It’s going to make it easier and make our data better.”

The secretary of state’s office tracks the internet addresses of people who use the cancellation website, and fraudulently canceling a voter’s registration is a felony.

Unless voters cancel their registrations themselves, they can stay registered for years because of state and federal laws that require notifications and waiting periods designed to ensure they aren’t wrongly disqualified.

Georgia election officials routinely cancel voters who haven’t participated in recent years, and conservative activists have filed over 100,000 voter eligibility challenges since 2021 seeking the removal of voters who they believe have moved away. Most voter challenges have been rejected by county election boards.

Roughly 300 cancellation requests had been filed through the website as of Thursday, and most of them were for people who had already changed their address with the U.S. Postal Service or were inactive voters who haven’t voted in recent years and likely moved away, Sterling said.

NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said the website should be taken offline because it’s a threat to voter access.

“Make no mistake — this decision is a direct attempt to stifle the voices of Georgia’s most powerful and historically disenfranchised voters,” Johnson said. “The NAACP demands that Secretary Raffensperger immediately reverse this process that is in direct violation of our fundamental right to vote.”

Georgia isn’t the only state with a voter registration cancellation website, according to the secretary of state’s office. States including Colorado and Nevada have similar websites.

Voters can check their registration status and sign up to vote through Georgia’s My Voter Page at www.mvp.sos.ga.gov.

Source

Election officials and voting rights experts are worried about the impact on 2024.

By Matt Shuham

Aug 8, 2024, 02:21 PM EDT

In his 34 years working in elections, Wesley Wilcox had never experienced what happened to him just a couple of weeks ago. A woman who said she was involved with the conspiracy theory group True the Vote came to his office with a list of names about 2,500 entries long, spanning about 800 printed pages.

She was challenging thousands of her neighbors’ eligibility to vote, and was urging Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida, to investigate them, and potentially, remove them from voter rolls altogether.

“This is by far the largest set of ‘challenges’ that have ever been delivered to this office,” Wilcox told HuffPost. “Exponentially so.”

And Wilcox isn’t alone. Since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely blamed widespread voter fraud, right-wing activists have sought to “clean” the election system by deleting tens of thousands of their neighbors from voter rolls.

They’ve been aided in their work by groups like True the Vote and the Election Integrity Network, which have promoted software that makes it easy to challenge the eligibility of thousands of voters at a time, simply by comparing U.S. Post Office change-of-address data to voter rolls and other lists. Across the country, activists are taking these lists to their local election officials, urging them to purge voters.

As Wilcox looked through a sample of the 2,500 names that were challenged in Marion County, he told HuffPost, he couldn’t find a single valid challenge. Instead, the challenges had been filed against a mix of legitimate, eligible voters; voters who simply shared common names like “David Martin” or “Rebecca Bennet”; and names that Wilcox had already removed from the voter rolls himself ages ago, either because the voter had died or moved out of the county. In short, he said, the underlying data was inaccurate and unreliable.

“I have yet to find one of them that I felt was credible enough for me to actually file documentation for that voter,” he said. “So as a good steward for voter registration, which is what I’m charged with doing, I should not act upon stuff that is proven to be not credible.”

This year, election officials like Wilcox have spent valuable time sorting through pages of these mass voter challenges. And voting rights advocates worry that the trend could result in eligible voters being removed from the rolls, or from accommodations like being on lists to automatically receive ballots in the mail.

Last month, the Texas secretary of state’s office sent a memo to election officials throughout the state reiterating Texas’ legal requirements for registration challenges, and state officials in Michigan, North Carolina and Nevada have sent out similar memos, according to documents reviewed by HuffPost.

But experts and election officials who spoke to HuffPost said voters should confirm their registration status now — before the November election season heats up — just to be safe.

“Voter challenges have been sold to citizens as a means of civic engagement — and I think what gets lost in the picture is that there are real voters on the other side of the screen,” Alice Clapman, senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights program, told HuffPost. “This activity, which seems to some people like a constructive way to help election officials, is actually making their jobs harder, and risking disenfranchising their neighbors and people in their community.”

The Era Of Mass Voter Challenges

Laws allowing challenges to voter registrations have existed, and been abused, for years. But the trend of mass challenges accelerated after Trump’s 2020 loss.

The month following that election, True the Vote teamed up with Georgia Republicans to challenge the eligibility of more than 364,000 voters in the state, based in part on U.S. Postal Service address-change data.

The mess that followed showed the flaws in the mass voter challenge process. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that challenged voters included a man whose son had the same name as him and had moved to New York, and other people who had moved out of state to take care of family members before moving back to Georgia.

Some voters only found out their registrations had been challenged when they didn’t receive requested ballots in the mail for Georgia’s January 2021 U.S. Senate run-off election. Ultimately — after courts stepped in — the vast majority of these challenges were rejected. True the Vote’s list “utterly lacked reliability” and “verge[d] on recklessness,” a federal judge later observed.

But True the Vote wasn’t done. The group, which was featured in the endlessly debunked conspiracy theory film “2000 Mules,” has spent years working to create the false perception that U.S. elections are plagued by widespread fraud. Four years before the 2020 election that he tried to steal, Trump cited True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips to assert that millions of ineligible voters cast ballots in the 2016 election. The claim, of course, was nonsense.

Now, True the Vote has turned its voter challenge technique into an app, called “IV3,” to allow activists across the country to create mass voter registration challenge lists based on Postal Service address-change data, local voter rolls and other information. The data is often well out-of-date, and there are lots of reasons people might legitimately change their address without changing their voter registration — such as students who temporarily relocate to college campuses or servicemembers located overseas.

Other seemingly suspicious records are easily explained. In one instance reported by CNN, True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht told a webinar about a “sketchy” address in Phoenix that hundreds of people had purportedly listed on their voter registration, saying she would “probably” challenge the registrations. The address, it turns out, was legitimate — a local nonprofit offers it as a mailing address for homeless people.

Other challenges targeted assisted living facilities and nursing homes, CNN reported. Engelbrecht has claimed that hundreds of thousands of challenges have been filed with IV3.

In Travis County, Texas — home to around 900,000 registered voters — election officials have seen an unprecedented number of challenges, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 this year alone, Chris Davis, the county’s voter registration director, told HuffPost. More than half of those challenges came from one woman, he said, though the majority of challenges rely on U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data, with many challengers saying they were volunteering with True the Vote.

“What we’ve seen is a lot of folks just taking that list and not doing a whole lot of work or research, [then] turning around and submitting it to us, and saying, ‘I hereby challenge the voter registration of all these individuals on the grounds of residence,’” Davis said.

The vast majority of challenges were irrelevant, he said, as they applied to people county officials had already put on the “inactive” voter list. What’s more, the challenges largely didn’t meet the requirement in Texas law for “personal knowledge” of the relevant challenge to the voter’s eligibility, Davis said, nor are most of the challenges sworn statements, which need to be made before an authorized person such as a notary.

Across the country, election officials are receiving similar challenges that don’t meet legal criteria. But many are still investigating them.

‘The Left Will Hate This’

True the Vote is not alone. Multiple right-wing groups have developed their own technology to empower volunteers to file mass voter challenges, all of which depend in some form or another on publicly available data like Postal Service change-of-address information and voter rolls — meaning they’re extremely susceptible to producing out-of-date or even harmful challenges.

One program, EagleAI — pronounced “Eagle Eye” — has been promoted by Cleta Mitchell, the conservative attorney who infamously participated in the 2020 telephone call in which Trump demanded Georgia’s secretary of state “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win the state.

Mitchell leads the Election Integrity Network — which itself is part of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a home base for former Trump administration officials and allies — and in that capacity, she has built a network of volunteers across the country.
“The left will hate this — hate this. But we love it,” Mitchell said of EagleAI during one presentation reported on by The Associated Press and NBC News. The elite Christian conservative fundraising group Ziklag announced plans to invest $800,000 in EagleAI, according to ProPublica and Documented, an investigative watchdog that has worked to keep track of registration purges.
At least one Georgia county has signed a contract to use the software, and in May, the director of the Florida Division of Elections sent county officials a list of 10,000 names to review that a local “concerned citizen” had generated with EagleAI.
Nonetheless, even grassroots right-wing activists appear to be growing frustrated with both EagleAI and IV3, calling data produced by the programs “completely nonfunctional” and “significantly inaccurate,” NBC News reported last month.
Other efforts are state-based, including the “Pigpen Project” in Nevada and “Soles to the Rolls” in Michigan. Some even go so far as to go door to door to ask voters to confirm their information, raising concerns about intimidation. The Republican Party is also involved in the effort — in June, a federal judge rejected a GOP lawsuit alleging Nevada officials had failed to properly maintain voter rolls. (The GOP’s data was “highly flawed,” the state said.) A similar suit, against the state of Michigan, is ongoing.

And some states have made mass challenges even easier. In Georgia, S.B. 202, passed in 2021, allowed anyone to formally challenge an unlimited number of registrations, and S.B. 189, passed this year, requires voters to defend their registration against even frivolous challenges, sometimes at in-person hearings. It faces a lawsuit.

One irony of the mass challenge trend is that there is already a widely credible, bipartisan tool for making sure states’ voter lists are up to date — and red states have left it en masse since last year.

ERIC, or the Electronic Registration Information Center, works to keep member states’ voter lists up to date by creating a central clearinghouse where members can share information — including change-of-address data, but also more sensitive information like driver’s license records.

ERIC’s membership peaked in 2022 when 34 states were part of the compact. But ERIC is yet another victim of the Republican Party’s relentless conspiracy theorizing about elections.

That’s because, in addition to helping maintain voter rolls, ERIC also requires member states to take steps to register eligible voters. That part of the compact wasn’t controversial until 2022 when the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit falsely said the right’s favorite bogeyman, George Soros, had “founded and funded” ERIC and that the multistate agreement was a “left wing voter registration drive.”

The lie spread, and nine Republican-led states ultimately left ERIC. As HuffPost reported last September, they haven’t been able to replace the service.

That void, in turn, “has allowed an unauthorized private group to swoop in and conduct a function that belongs to the state,” voting rights groups in Ohio, one state that left ERIC last year, said in a letter to Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) last month, referring to the Ohio Election Integrity Network, a local group that has challenged registrations.

The Risks of Purging Voters – And What You Can Do

Even if many challenges are rejected by election administrators, many are not. And given that America’s elections — including its voter rolls — are largely administered on the local level, there’s always a chance that purges go unnoticed.

In Waterford Township, Michigan, for example, the local clerk removed 1,000 people from voter rolls — including an active-duty Air Force officer, who was incorrectly purged — after activists challenged the registrations based on Postal Service change-of-address data. The clerk sent certified mailers to the list and removed any voters from the rolls who did not respond. The purge only became news months later when The New York Times reported it.

The challenges also add more work to election administrators’ full schedules — when their responsibilities already include voter registration list maintenance.

“We’ve got all we can say grace over just doing what we’re required to do, so someone dropping 2,500 [names] on us is a recipe for, ‘Hey, we’re just not going to have the capacity to get it done,’” Wilcox said, noting that the lengthy list of names reminded him of another trend — inundating election offices with public records requests.

There are federal protections in place for voters’ benefit. According to the National Voter Registration Act, a voter can only be removed from voter rolls due to a change in residence if they request the removal or confirm their change of address — or, if neither condition is met, the voter fails to respond to a mailed notice and fails to vote during the next two federal general election cycles after receiving the notice.

On top of that requirement, the NVRA prohibits election offices from “systematically” removing ineligible voters from registration lists within 90 days of a federal election, which was Wednesday, Aug. 7, this year.

But voters should remain vigilant. Georgia’s new law, for example, allows voters to be removed from the rolls up to 45 days before an election. And Davis, from Travis County, Texas, said there’s an additional concern that voters “inadvertently removed from the rolls” may not realize that until much closer to Election Day.

Clapman, from the Brennan Center, said that even voters who remain registered could find themselves on “inactive” lists, meaning — depending on local and state rules — they might not receive a mail-in ballot even though they’d previously been on a list to receive one automatically. If all else fails, she said, voters who find themselves kicked off voter rolls should insist on a provisional ballot.

But there’s still time to avoid that hassle. The election officials HuffPost spoke to stressed that, as November draws nearer, their offices will become bee hives of activity. It’s better to confirm your registration status sooner than later, they said. Check your state or county’s online voter registration portal, if there is one, or simply call your local election office to ask about your registration status.

Or, if you really can’t figure out your status, feel free to submit your registration application again. Election offices have processes in place for updating old registrations if they receive a duplicate, and sometimes it’s helpful simply to update your address on file or the signature you use to verify your ballot. But be wary. Some states’ registration deadlines occur days or even weeks before Election Day.

“Do yourself a favor, do the elections office a favor — and don’t wait,” Wilcox said.

Source

The flaw would have allowed anyone to submit a voter registration cancellation request for any Georgian using their name, date of birth and county of residence — information that is easily discoverable online.

by Doug Bock Clark

Aug. 5, 5:45 p.m. EDT

Until Monday, a new online portal run by the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office contained what experts describe as a serious security vulnerability that would have allowed anyone to submit a voter cancellation request for any Georgian. All that was required was a name, date of birth and county of residence — information easily discoverable for many people online.

The flaw was brought to the attention of ProPublica and Atlanta News First over the weekend by a cybersecurity researcher, Jason Parker. Parker, who uses they/them pronouns, said that after discovering it, they attempted to contact the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. The office said it had no records of Parker’s attempts to reach out.

“It’s a terrible vulnerability to leave open, and it’s essential to be fixed,” Parker said.

The issue Parker exposed was “as bad as any voter cancellation bug could be” and “incredibly sloppy coding,” said Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at the cybersecurity firm Silent Push, who reviewed the flaw at the request of ProPublica. “It’s shocking to have one of these bugs occur on a serious website.” Edwards said that even a basic penetration test, in which outside experts vet the security of a website before its launch, “should have picked this up.”

ProPublica and Atlanta News First jointly alerted the Secretary of State’s Office to the vulnerability and held the publication of their articles until it was fixed.

“We have updated the process to include an error message letting the individual know their submission is incomplete and will not be processed,” Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, said in a statement from the Secretary of State’s Office.

In the days after the portal launched last Monday, The Associated Press and The Current each reported the existence of separate security vulnerabilities that exposed voters’ sensitive personal information, including the last four digits of their Social Security number and their full driver’s license number. The Secretary of State’s Office told the news organizations that it quickly fixed the portal. Democrats warned that the system could be abused, as right-wing activists have been challenging tens of thousands of voter registrations in a different process that a 2021 state law expanded. Over the weekend, ProPublica reported that users of the portal had unsuccessfully attempted to cancel the voter registrations of two prominent Republican officials, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The flaw found by Parker was different from the two previously reported ones. This one would allow any user of the portal to bypass the screen that requires a driver’s license number and submit the cancellation request without it.

The Secretary of State “needs to consider this an all-hands-on-deck” moment “and hire multiple testing and security firms and stop relying on the public’s goodwill and pro bono security researchers to test the quality of their website,” Edwards said. “At this point, we should assume there are other subtle bugs that could have potentially serious impact.” Edwards said that it would have been easy for a malicious actor to automate cancellation requests to get around security measures built into the website and submit thousands of them.

In a video shared with ProPublica, Parker, who is moving from Georgia to another state, demonstrated how the registration cancellation tool could be exploited in roughly a minute. First, they entered their name, date of birth and county of residence to get past the website’s initial screening page. When the portal asked them for a driver’s license number, Parker right-clicked to inspect the browser’s HTML code — a basic option available to anyone — and deleted a few lines of code requiring them to submit their driver’s license number. Parker then hit submit. A window popped up stating that “Your cancellation request has been successfully submitted” and that county election workers would process the request within a week.

Parker said it took them less than two hours of poking around the website to find the vulnerability.

“Incomplete paper and online applications will not be accepted,” Evans said in the statement. (Parker’s cancellation request would have lacked a driver’s license number.) The Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to individual questions about what testing the portal underwent before launch, the system’s security procedures, what happened to Parker’s cancellation request and how the public could be sure of the portal’s security given the recent disclosures of security flaws.

“The Secretary of State’s Office needs to do better,” said Marisa Pyle, the senior democracy defense manager for Georgia with All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy organization. “The state needs to be really intentional about how it rolls out these things. It needs to make sure they’re secure and provide their rationale for making them.”

Jake Braun, the author of a book on cybersecurity flaws in election systems and lecturer at the University of Chicago, said that there is a long history of elections-related websites suffering from easily exploitable security failures, including Russians hacking election infrastructure during the 2016 election and public-interest competitions in which participants breached replicas of state election websites in minutes. Online elections infrastructure, he said, “needs more standards and better standards.”

Edwards said that the portal’s vulnerability-plagued rollout showed the necessity of improving the vetting process.

“Georgia should step up and pass a law saying all new websites in which the public interacts with government documents should have an outside review,” Edwards said. The public “should expect” officials “did some due diligence.”

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By Madeleine Greenberg

June 26, 2024

Today, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in a case challenging Alabama secretary of state’s refusal to produce purged voter records. The 11th Circuit ruled that although Alabama does have to release information to non-profit groups, it does not have to do so in a way that is accessible or cost effective for those groups. 

In 2022, Greater Birmingham Ministries — a nonprofit civil rights organization — filed this lawsuit against former Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) due to his refusal to produce records of voters who were purged after the 2020 election and voter registration applicants who were denied registration or purged from the state’s voter rolls because of felony convictions dating back at least two years. 

Specifically, the plaintiffs alleged that Merrill refused to produce the requested voter purge records without payment of over $1,000 and also refused to produce the felony records altogether, claiming that they were “outside the scope” of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In 2022, the trial court issued an opinion in favor of the plaintiff on all claims and ordered the Alabama secretary of state to produce all of the records requested by the plaintiff in digital form. Greater Birmingham Ministries was able to gain access to the purged voter records, but the Republican secretary of state appealed and  the 11th Circuit reversed that opinion today.  

Now, as a result of today’s opinion, non profit organizations such as Greater Birmingham Ministries will retain the ability to have access to purged voter information, but they will not be able to get that information electronically. Additionally, the court is now allowing the Alabama secretary of state to impose a fee that is greater than the cost of producing the records. As the dissent by former voting rights attorney Judge Nancy Abudu points out, this can be a “cost-prohibitive” barrier to groups doing important pro-democracy work. 

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BY  JEFF AMY AND TRENTON DANIEL

Updated 11:02 PM CDT, June 28, 2024

WOODSTOCK, Ga. (AP) — Conservative activists in Georgia and some other states are quietly pushing a way to remove names from the voting rolls without filing a formal legal challenge.

They’re asking election administrators to use their data to purge voter registrations, which means names could be removed in a less public process than a formal voter challenge. The strategy could mean electors won’t be summoned in advance to defend their voting rights and the identities of those seeking to purge voters might not be routinely public.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office insists any living voter stricken from the rolls must be notified. But because Georgia has 159 counties and no formal statewide rules governing these less formal inquiries, it’s unclear how every county will react. People removed in error could vote a provisional ballot, but local officials might count those votes only in exceptional cases.

The strategy is expanding even as a new Georgia law takes effect Monday that could lead to counties removing a larger share of voters using formal voter challenges.

That law already has been met with alarm by Democrats and voting rights advocates. They view the hundreds of thousands of voter challenges filed since 2020 as part of Georgia’s long history of blocking voting dating back to slavery. Now, as details of below-radar efforts surface, those advocates fear a double-barreled attack on voting.

“There’s built-in transparency into the challenge process, and some level of voter protection in that notice requirements and hearings are required,” said state Rep. Saira Draper, an Atlanta Democrat and Joe Biden’s 2020 state director of voter protection. “You can’t sidestep that by just unofficially challenging people and saying it’s not a challenge because we’re not calling it a challenge.”

The less-formal approach has worked at least once. In suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County, the county removed some voters after a man sent inquiries listing 245 potentially dead people.

“All we’re doing is a free service. Hey, this group of 500 people, or this group of 800 people said they moved. Maybe you should look into it,” Jason Frazier, a Republican who has formally challenged nearly 10,000 voters in Atlanta’s heavily Democratic Fulton County, said during a presentation Friday.

The effort is one prong of a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump allies to take names from rolls.

An Associated Press survey of Georgia’s 40 largest counties finds more than 18,000 voters have been challenged in 2023 and 2024, although counties rejected most challenges. Election officials predict challenges will surge under the new law.

Most controversially, that law says officials can use as evidence the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address list showing people have moved, although not as the sole reason for removing voters. Opponents slam that list as unreliable.

It’s unclear how much change the law will bring because the state hasn’t issued guidelines to counties on handling challenges.

County officials routinely remove voters who are dead, convicted of felonies, mentally incompetent or no longer living in Georgia, using lists provided by the secretary of state’s office.

For people who have moved, federal law says Georgia can only cancel an inactive registration if a voter doesn’t respond to a mailing and then doesn’t vote in two following federal general elections. That process takes years.

Activists fueled by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen say state cleanup efforts are woefully inadequate and inaccuracies invite fraud. Douglas Frank, a former teacher traveling the country peddling election conspiracy theories, urged Georgians to use software called EagleAI to file challenges this spring.

“You have the constitutional right to challenge any other voter in your county,” Frank said at Cherokee County Republican headquarters in Woodstock. “In fact, it’s not merely your right. It’s your duty to clean the voter rolls.”

Texas-based True the Vote challenged 364,000 Georgia voters prior to two U.S. Senate runoffs in 2021. Individuals and groups have since challenged many more. Election officials say many challenges are powered by EagleAI. The tool was created by Dr. John “Rick” Richards Jr., a retired physician and entrepreneur who lives in suburban Augusta’s Columbia County.

Richards said in a Wednesday interview that people using his software are citizen volunteers, likening the work of finding ineligible voters to picking up roadside trash.

“No one is going to be denied the right to vote,” Richards said. “That’s a bunch of hooey.”

In online meetings and in-person appearances over the past year, Richards has pushed EagleAI as a sophisticated platform to cleanse dirty voter lists. The Associated Press found the platform is funded and used by supporters of Trump, some of whom worked to overturn the 2020 vote, and entwined with the Republican’s campaign.

An EagleAI document last year touted the system’s “use of AI” and “multitiered algorithms” to cleanse dirty voter lists, but Richards now says there is no artificial intelligence at work. The software instead draws in part from a database of “suspicious” voters hand-built by conservative activists, the AP found.

Over past months, an AP reporter joined online meetings publicized among activists before eventually being asked to leave. The AP also obtained additional meeting videos to glean a behind-the-scenes look at how the software is used in states including Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Nevada and Ohio.

“The left will hate this — hate this. But we love it,” Cleta Mitchell, a frequent participant, said during one presentation. Mitchell is a GOP election attorney who took part in the call when Trump implored Raffensperger to “find” more votes in the 2020 election. While Trump was indicted in Georgia for the call, Mitchell was not. Mitchell now is a leader in multiple organizations pushing to purge voting rolls.

Richards called Mitchell’s affiliations “irrelevant.”

“This has nothing to do whatsoever with the 2020 election — has nothing to do with the current politicians,” he said. “It has to do with what’s right is right.”

Richards’ hometown election board in Columbia County agreed in December to buy EagleAI software, the only Georgia government known to have done so.

The county agreed to pay $2,000, saying EagleAI would help maintain its voter list but wouldn’t be “the sole means to remove a voter.” But the deal stalled because Richards hasn’t returned a signed contract. He said elections officials have been too busy thus far to use the contract’s 90-day training period.

Eugene Williams, an active voter challenger and EagleAI user, emailed Cobb County Elections Director Tate Fall three lists totaling 245 potentially dead voters in December, January and March, citing obituaries.

“When we investigated, most of them had already been removed from the voter roll,” Fall told the AP. “But we have removed voters based on the data that he sent us.”

However, she added no voter would be removed without evidence and a vote by the county election board.

Others are pushing election officials to act using software other than EagleAI. True the Vote says its IV3 tool has highlighted 317,886 “invalid voter records.”

Mitchell has repeatedly urged allies to befriend officials, including on a 2023 EagleAI call with Richards.

She suggested asking officials: “‘How can we help you? What are the things that you wish you had that you don’t have?’ And they always say more money and more people. Well, you can say, ‘We have people, and we’re here to help you.’”

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