Legislative Updates
Arizona: Pima County Superior Court Judge Casey F. McGinley blocked Cochise County’s plan to conduct a full hand-count of ballots from the current election — a measure requested by Republican officials who expressed unfounded concerns that vote-counting machines are untrustworthy. The ruling came after a full-day hearing on Friday during which opponents presented their case and called witnesses. McGinley said the county board of supervisors overstepped its legal authority by ordering the county recorder to count all the ballots cast in the election that concludes on Tuesday rather than the small sample required by state law. The lawsuit only challenged a full hand-count of an estimated 30,000 early ballots, but the ruling went further by blocking hand-counts of both the early ballots and those cast on Election Day.
McGinley wrote that state election laws lay out a detailed procedure for randomly choosing which Election Day ballots are chosen for the standard hand-count. “This entire process would be rendered superfluous if the court were to construe (that section) to initially select 100% of the precinct ballots as its starting point,” the judge wrote. “Because the statute does not permit elections officials to begin the precinct hand-count by counting all ballots cast, the Board’s requirement that elections officials do so here is unlawful.”
The state’s Citizens Clean Elections Commission has been fighting to stop a conservative advocacy group from using a similar name. And the state commission now wants immediate action, in the form of a restraining order. The conservative group Clean Elections USA has been monitoring drop boxes in Maricopa County and alleging that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Commission director Tom Collins said the group’s name has caused confusion, leading Arizona residents to believe the state commission is the one monitoring the drop boxes. A lawsuit filed by the commission cites a post titled “10 plus ways the election was rigged in Maricopa County.” Collins says while that is not only inaccurate, it is causing people to believe that is the position of the state commission.
California: Los Angeles prosecutors have dismissed charges against the head of a Michigan election software company in a case that right-wing groups say shows proof of voting system vulnerabilities, citing “potential bias” in the investigation. Eugene Yu, chief executive of Konnech Inc, was charged last month with two felonies for allegedly violating the company’s contract with Los Angeles County by transferring election workers’ personal information to servers in China. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, which brought the charges, has acknowledged starting the investigation due to a complaint from Gregg Phillips of True the Vote, a Texas nonprofit and prominent purveyor of baseless voter-fraud claims. The District Attorney’s Office said it sought to dismiss the case, citing an unspecified bias. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted the dismissal without prejudice, meaning charges can be refiled in future. “We are concerned about both the pace of the investigation and the potential bias in the presentation and investigation of the evidence,” the office said in a statement. “As a result, we have decided to ask the court to dismiss the current case, and alert the public in order to ensure transparency.”
Colorado: Richard Ean Patton, 31 was arrested last week by Pueblo police after an incident on June 28 in which police claim he inserted a device into a voting machine. No information was breached, and no major disruption was caused to the voting process, according to the Pueblo Police Department. Patton will be the first in the state charged under a new felony law, according to Annie Orloff, a spokesperson for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. The election law, which upgraded the charge for tampering with election equipment from a Class 1 misdemeanor to a Class 5 felony, was amended this spring. Under Colorado law, a Class 5 felony is punishable by a one- to two-year jail sentence and/or a fine between $1,000 and $100,000.
Georgia: Voters who were never mailed their absentee ballots filed a lawsuit asking a judge to require Cobb County to send ballots by overnight mail and extend the state’s deadline to return them. The lawsuit comes after Cobb election officials acknowledged that they failed to mail absentee ballots to 1,036 voters who had requested them. “Hundreds of eligible Cobb County voters did everything right and yet find themselves on the brink of total disenfranchisement because they were never mailed their absentee ballots, as is required under Georgia law,” said Jonathan Topaz, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project. The lawsuit was filed in Superior Court by four voters living out of state who weren’t mailed absentee ballots and the Cobb County Democracy Center, a voter education organization. Without relief from the courts, it’s unlikely that voters will be able to return their ballots in time to be counted, the lawsuit said. Under Georgia law, absentee ballots must be received at election offices by the time polls close on Tuesday, with a later deadline of Nov. 14 for military and overseas voters. Cobb County Superior Court Judge Kellie Hill ordered the county Board of Elections and Registration to send via overnight delivery Monday replacement ballots to affected voters who had not already been sent replacement ballots. And Hill ordered that any of the affected voters would be allowed to vote in person, by replacement ballot, or by federal write-in absentee ballot. The order was agreed to by county election officials after a hearing before Hill on Monday
Illinois: A lawsuit was filed in Champaign County alleging a top election official mishandled official ballots, a judge ordered that official be removed from all of her Election Day duties, and that same judge scrapped the order, allowing the Champaign County Deputy Clerk to continue working for the office. Lawyers representing Champaign County Board member Jim McGuire filed a lawsuit alleging that Champaign County deputy clerk Michelle Jett mishandled official ballots. Attached to the lawsuit is a sworn affidavit from an election judge in County Clerk Aaron Ammons’ office, which included pictures of ballots on the passenger seat and floor of Jett’s car. The election judge could not see exactly how many ballots were unsealed in the car and did not try to speculate as to why the ballots were unsealed in the car, to begin with. “As an election judge, I understand that there is no lawful explanation for a collection of unsealed official ballots to be stored in the condition I observed,” the election judge wrote in the affidavit. Within hours of the lawsuit being filed, Circuit Judge Anna Benjamin issued an emergency temporary restraining order, which ordered Jett to be stripped of all of her election-day duties. The judge threw out the order after Jett and the county provided evidence they were sample ballots being used to test voting machines.
Michigan: The Michigan Supreme Court suspended a Michigan Court of Claims order — celebrated by Republicans — that required revisions to the instructions for election observers that monitor polling locations and absentee ballot counting rooms. The Michigan Supreme Court’s order leaves in place for the general election the same poll challenger guidelines used in the recent August primary. In a statement concurring with the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision to suspend the lower court order, Justice Elizabeth Welch — a Democratic-nominated justice — chided those who brought the lawsuits for waiting until late September to file them. “The general election is now less than one week away. Training for poll workers has been completed. It would be impossible to retrain thousands of workers across our state within a matter of days,” she wrote.
A Wayne County judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Republican secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo that sought to disqualify absentee ballots in Detroit. The judge said the suit “failed dramatically,” and that the claims made by Karamo were “unsubstantiated and/or misinterpret Michigan election law.” “Plaintiffs have raised a false flag of election law violations and corruption concerning Detroit’s procedures for the November 8th election. This Court’s ruling takes down that flag,” a Wayne County circuit court ruling reads. “Plaintiffs’ failure to produce any evidence that the procedures for this November 8th election violate state or federal election law demonizes the Detroit City Clerk, her office staff, and the 1,200 volunteers working this election. These claims are unjustified, devoid of any evidentiary basis and cannot be allowed to stand.”
Missouri: Judge Jon Beetem temporarily blocked part of a new state law restricting civic groups from registering large groups of new voters. The Jefferson City circuit judge hit pause on rules that banned groups from paying volunteers to hand out voter registration applications, required groups seeking to sign up more than 10 voters to register with the state, and mandated those volunteers be Missouri voters themselves. Beetem wrote that the League of Women Voters and Missouri NAACP, who sued in August to block the law, had “sufficiently alleged” that the parts of the law in question “chill their protected speech.” The law, passed by the Republican-led legislature this past year, is House Bill 1878. “Plaintiffs argue, and (attorneys with the state) do not contest, that no other state has a restriction on voter engagement speech that even approaches the breadth of this statute,” Beetem wrote. “Such direct restraints on pure speech — and core political speech like encouraging political participation in particular ― are antithetical to the core tenets of freedom of speech.”
Nevada: Clark County District Court Judge Timothy Williams has ruled against the Republican National Committee’s legal request for Clark County to have equal political party representation on manual signature verification boards for mail ballots. Williams issued the order Thursday, a day after attorneys representing the RNC, Clark County and a cadre of Democratic groups argued the case following oral arguments from the parties. In the order, Williams wrote that the RNC’s arguments that the county’s hiring of temporary employees to assist with signature verification did not constitute the creation of a “special election board,” a term defined in state law that requires membership to “represent all political parties as equally as possible.” He added that it would be a “big stretch” to classify those temporary employees as members of a special election board. “…Temporary employees do not have power to make decisions on ballot-counting procedures,” the order states. “Consequently, the temporary employees simply perform ministerial functions for the County, and by extension, the State of Nevada.”
Early voting dates were added at a reservation on the Nevada-Idaho border after Shoshone-Paiute tribal members sued over equal access. The Elko County Clerk scheduled three days of early voting at the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Owyhee for the first time this year, then added five more at the end of October and early November as a result of the lawsuit. Owyhee will also have a ballot drop-box on Election Day. The lawsuit claimed that the limited early voting schedule “violates state law, and imposes constitutional burdens on their fundamental right to vote.” The Duck Valley tribes were assisted in the lawsuit by Four Directions Native Vote. “After meeting for several hours, the Tribes and Elko County settled the equal voting access lawsuit for all future elections with greatly expanded access for election 2022,” stated Four Directions.
New Jersey: Superior Court Judge William G. Mennen IV has ruled that a Hunterdon County woman who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2021 will be permitted to cast her first vote in next week’s general election even though her voter registration form was never received by the county Board of Elections. Karen L. testified that she had mailed a voter registration form last year and questioned her status when two family members received sample ballots and she had not. “It must gave got lost in the mail or something,” she told Mennen. Mennen said he found her testimony to be credible. “She is to be lauded for her efforts,” the judge stated.
New York: Dutchess County Supreme Court, Judge Christie D’Alessio has ordered that a polling place be established on the campus of Vassar College. The lawsuit was filed by the League of Women Voters, a Vassar College professor, and a Vassar College student, seeking a court order for Republican Elections Commissioner Erik Haight to abide by a state law requiring colleges with more than 300 students living on campus, to have a polling place on the college property. ’Alessio ruled that the law is clear in requiring a polling place on campus. The decision, in part, says, “This Court grants the petition in its entirety. The plain language of Election Law g 4-104[5-a] which includes the word ‘shall’ (as opposed to ‘may’ or ‘should’) specifically mandates the designation of a voting polling place on a college or university campus where, as here. the petitioner demonstrated that the college or university campus contains three hundred or more registrants to vote at an address on such college or university campus.”
Pennsylvania: On Saturday, the state Supreme Court unexpectedly issued an additional order in the vote-by-mail case it had ruled in earlier in the week. The new order clarified the court’s definition: Mail-in ballots are to be rejected in this election if the handwritten dates fall before Sept. 19, 2022, or after Nov. 8 (Election Day), and absentee ballots are to be rejected if they are dated before Aug. 30, 2022, or after Nov. 8. The court’s separate time frame for absentee ballots appears to come from conflating those votes with a different kind of absentee ballot — the ones sent to military and overseas voters, known as UOCAVA for the federal law that governs them — which are sent out 70 days before Election Day, which is Aug. 30 this year.
The NAACP, ACLU, and other political organizations are suing the Pennsylvania courts over mail-in ballots. They want mail-in ballots with improper dating to be counted. This comes just days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that they shouldn’t be counted after a lawsuit was filed by the Republican National Committee. The court ruled that undated ballots received at election offices must be set aside and not counted. Now, they are clarifying what “incorrectly dated” means. They are ballots with outer envelopes listing a date that falls outside the date range of September 19, 2022, through November 8, 2022.
York County has settled an injunction agreeing, among other things, to provide sample ballots in Spanish at all polling places and bi-lingual ballots in 18 precincts, to make translators available by phone to voters and poll workers, to provide signage at polling places in Spanish and to hire 20 poll workers to assist Spanish-speaking voters. The lawsuit arose from a survey that CASA conducted of voting practices, and adherence to language-access provisions in the Voting Rights Act, in York, Lancaster and Dauphin counties. The organization found problems in York and Lancaster counties. The lawsuit remains active. The settlement reached addresses issues brought up in the preliminary injunction, issues that could be resolved in time for the Nov. 8 election. Among those issues are providing bilingual ballots and access to assistance for Spanish-speaking voters in all of York County’s voting precincts.
South Dakota: A Minnehaha County judge will not stop the auditor’s office from counting absentee ballots on election day. Two people filed a civil lawsuit last week, asking for a temporary restraining order. They didn’t want mail-in ballots counted until the county auditor confirm that the people who requested them were properly registered. According to the South Dakota e-courts system, a judge issued an order saying the temporary restraining order is denied
Tennessee: After more than 200 Davidson County voters were given incorrect ballots during the early voting period, the Davidson County Election commission announced on Saturday procedures for Election Day intended to give those voters the opportunity to cast votes in their correct electoral districts. “We have posted important information on our website for all Davidson County voters,” said Jeff Roberts, Davidson County Administrator of Elections. “A red banner at the top of the page includes a link to ‘Important Election Information.’ When voters click on that link, they will find guidance for what to do if they voted early and what to do if they intend to vote on Election Day.” The information includes a list of voters who may have been assigned incorrect early voting ballots. Voters finding their name on the list can cast a provisional ballot on Election Day only at the Davidson County Election Commission office, 1417 Murfreesboro Pike in Nashville, not at assigned Election Day polling locations. The ACLU of Tennessee filed a lawsuit, naming as defendants Roberts, the members of the Davidson County Election Commission, Gov. Bill Lee, Secretary of State Tre Hargett and state election coordinator Mark Goins. Within an hour of the suit being filed, the parties reached a legal agreement.
Texas: After spending nearly a week in jail, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips — leaders of Texas-based right-wing voting activist group True the Vote — have been released. They’d been held for contempt of court since Halloween, having repeatedly refused to release the name of a man they called a “confidential FBI informant” who is a person of interest in a defamation and hacking case against them. The person remains unidentified. Their release came after True the Vote’s lawyers appealed the contempt order by federal district Judge Kenneth Hoyt to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, arguing the finding of contempt was in error and the pair should be released from jail. The appeals court granted their release but kept the remainder of Hoyt’s order in place.
The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday set the stage for a legal fight over whether to count ballots Harris County voters cast during an extended hour of voting ordered by a lower court. That lower court ordered that the state’s most populous county extend voting hours until 8 p.m. after several polling places were delayed in opening. The state’s highest civil court blocked that ruling and ordered Harris County to separate ballots cast by voters who were not in line by 7 p.m., the normal cutoff for voting in Texas. The Supreme Court’s order followed a request by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to reverse the lower court’s order. The Supreme Court posted the order on Twitter at 8:30 p.m. It’s unclear how many votes were cast during the extra hour of voting, but Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee raised the prospect that the state would ask for those votes to be thrown out. The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they would pursue such action. Voters who got in line after 7 p.m. were required to cast a provisional ballot, which the county had already said would take more time to process and would not be initially counted in election night returns. Harris County is home to nearly 2.6 million registered voters.
Virginia: Judge Thomas Horne sided with the Prince William County Republican Committee in a lawsuit it filed against Prince William County Registrar Eric Olsen and the Prince William County Electoral Board. The party argued that Olsen and the board broke the law by failing to ensure that the chief and assistant chief election officers at each polling place were evenly split between the parties. In response, Olsen and the electoral board contend they “doubled” the overall number of Republican election officers working the polls on Tuesday as a result of a targeted mailers sent over the summer. But they said they assigned chief and assistant chiefs based on workers’ experience with prior elections in an effort to ensure a smooth process on Election Day. The GOP Committee’s lawsuit stated the the party’s research into the voting records of election officers assigned to represent Republicans revealed that several had participated in past Democratic primaries. Virginia does not register voters according to political parties but keeps a record of voters’ participation in party primaries, which can be accessed for a fee from the Virginia Department of Elections.
A last-minute push to upend how Virginia counts its votes was dismissed Monday after the man behind the legal effort didn’t show up to court. James Renwick Manship filed an injunction to temporarily block the use of electronic voting machines used to count ballots in Virginia for years and have the Department of Elections “implement a state-wide Hand Count of Paper Ballots.” In his injunction, Manship called machines used to tabulate ballots in Virginia “exploitable” and “flawed” but did not provide specific evidence to back his claims. The Virginia Attorney General’s Office, led by Republican Jason Miyares, represented the state’s Department of Elections in the case. Miyares’ office argued in a motion to have the case thrown out that Manship’s allegations “are long on conspiracy and short on fact.”
Wisconsin: Former Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata, 45, of Milwaukee was charged with misconduct in public office, a felony, and three misdemeanor counts of making a false statement to obtain an absentee ballot. If convicted, Zapata faces up to 3 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine on the Class I Felony count and six months behind bars and a $1,000 for each of the three misdemeanors, according to the complaint. Zapata was fired by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson this week after city officials discovered she had requested three military ballots and had them sent to the home of state Rep. Janel Brandtjen of Menomonee Falls.
The conservative Thomas More Society, on behalf of veterans and Waukesha County voters, filed a lawsuit Friday asking a court to order Wisconsin elections officials to sequester all military absentee and mail-in ballots. The lawsuit asks the Waukesha County Circuit Court for a temporary injunction requiring elections officials to set aside military ballots so their authenticity can be verified. The suit was motivated by the case of a Milwaukee Election Commission deputy administrator, who was fired after admitting to fraudulently requesting military ballots. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Maxwell denied the request, calling the step a “drastic remedy” but also chiding the Wisconsin Elections Commission over its guidance to municipal clerks. “I think I made clear in my questioning that I felt that that was a drastic remedy, that I felt that it was at least at a minimum a temporary disenfranchisement of our military voters’ votes to say, ‘let’s put them on hold and let’s figure out after the fact whether or not there’s bad votes cast,’” Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Maxwell said at the end of a two-hour hearing.
Legal Updates
Arizona: Pima County Superior Court Judge Casey F. McGinley blocked Cochise County’s plan to conduct a full hand-count of ballots from the current election — a measure requested by Republican officials who expressed unfounded concerns that vote-counting machines are untrustworthy. The ruling came after a full-day hearing on Friday during which opponents presented their case and called witnesses. McGinley said the county board of supervisors overstepped its legal authority by ordering the county recorder to count all the ballots cast in the election that concludes on Tuesday rather than the small sample required by state law. The lawsuit only challenged a full hand-count of an estimated 30,000 early ballots, but the ruling went further by blocking hand-counts of both the early ballots and those cast on Election Day.
McGinley wrote that state election laws lay out a detailed procedure for randomly choosing which Election Day ballots are chosen for the standard hand-count. “This entire process would be rendered superfluous if the court were to construe (that section) to initially select 100% of the precinct ballots as its starting point,” the judge wrote. “Because the statute does not permit elections officials to begin the precinct hand-count by counting all ballots cast, the Board’s requirement that elections officials do so here is unlawful.”
The state’s Citizens Clean Elections Commission has been fighting to stop a conservative advocacy group from using a similar name. And the state commission now wants immediate action, in the form of a restraining order. The conservative group Clean Elections USA has been monitoring drop boxes in Maricopa County and alleging that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Commission director Tom Collins said the group’s name has caused confusion, leading Arizona residents to believe the state commission is the one monitoring the drop boxes. A lawsuit filed by the commission cites a post titled “10 plus ways the election was rigged in Maricopa County.” Collins says while that is not only inaccurate, it is causing people to believe that is the position of the state commission.
California: Los Angeles prosecutors have dismissed charges against the head of a Michigan election software company in a case that right-wing groups say shows proof of voting system vulnerabilities, citing “potential bias” in the investigation. Eugene Yu, chief executive of Konnech Inc, was charged last month with two felonies for allegedly violating the company’s contract with Los Angeles County by transferring election workers’ personal information to servers in China. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, which brought the charges, has acknowledged starting the investigation due to a complaint from Gregg Phillips of True the Vote, a Texas nonprofit and prominent purveyor of baseless voter-fraud claims. The District Attorney’s Office said it sought to dismiss the case, citing an unspecified bias. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted the dismissal without prejudice, meaning charges can be refiled in future. “We are concerned about both the pace of the investigation and the potential bias in the presentation and investigation of the evidence,” the office said in a statement. “As a result, we have decided to ask the court to dismiss the current case, and alert the public in order to ensure transparency.”
Colorado: Richard Ean Patton, 31 was arrested last week by Pueblo police after an incident on June 28 in which police claim he inserted a device into a voting machine. No information was breached, and no major disruption was caused to the voting process, according to the Pueblo Police Department. Patton will be the first in the state charged under a new felony law, according to Annie Orloff, a spokesperson for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. The election law, which upgraded the charge for tampering with election equipment from a Class 1 misdemeanor to a Class 5 felony, was amended this spring. Under Colorado law, a Class 5 felony is punishable by a one- to two-year jail sentence and/or a fine between $1,000 and $100,000.
Georgia: Voters who were never mailed their absentee ballots filed a lawsuit asking a judge to require Cobb County to send ballots by overnight mail and extend the state’s deadline to return them. The lawsuit comes after Cobb election officials acknowledged that they failed to mail absentee ballots to 1,036 voters who had requested them. “Hundreds of eligible Cobb County voters did everything right and yet find themselves on the brink of total disenfranchisement because they were never mailed their absentee ballots, as is required under Georgia law,” said Jonathan Topaz, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project. The lawsuit was filed in Superior Court by four voters living out of state who weren’t mailed absentee ballots and the Cobb County Democracy Center, a voter education organization. Without relief from the courts, it’s unlikely that voters will be able to return their ballots in time to be counted, the lawsuit said. Under Georgia law, absentee ballots must be received at election offices by the time polls close on Tuesday, with a later deadline of Nov. 14 for military and overseas voters. Cobb County Superior Court Judge Kellie Hill ordered the county Board of Elections and Registration to send via overnight delivery Monday replacement ballots to affected voters who had not already been sent replacement ballots. And Hill ordered that any of the affected voters would be allowed to vote in person, by replacement ballot, or by federal write-in absentee ballot. The order was agreed to by county election officials after a hearing before Hill on Monday
Illinois: A lawsuit was filed in Champaign County alleging a top election official mishandled official ballots, a judge ordered that official be removed from all of her Election Day duties, and that same judge scrapped the order, allowing the Champaign County Deputy Clerk to continue working for the office. Lawyers representing Champaign County Board member Jim McGuire filed a lawsuit alleging that Champaign County deputy clerk Michelle Jett mishandled official ballots. Attached to the lawsuit is a sworn affidavit from an election judge in County Clerk Aaron Ammons’ office, which included pictures of ballots on the passenger seat and floor of Jett’s car. The election judge could not see exactly how many ballots were unsealed in the car and did not try to speculate as to why the ballots were unsealed in the car, to begin with. “As an election judge, I understand that there is no lawful explanation for a collection of unsealed official ballots to be stored in the condition I observed,” the election judge wrote in the affidavit. Within hours of the lawsuit being filed, Circuit Judge Anna Benjamin issued an emergency temporary restraining order, which ordered Jett to be stripped of all of her election-day duties. The judge threw out the order after Jett and the county provided evidence they were sample ballots being used to test voting machines.
Michigan: The Michigan Supreme Court suspended a Michigan Court of Claims order — celebrated by Republicans — that required revisions to the instructions for election observers that monitor polling locations and absentee ballot counting rooms. The Michigan Supreme Court’s order leaves in place for the general election the same poll challenger guidelines used in the recent August primary. In a statement concurring with the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision to suspend the lower court order, Justice Elizabeth Welch — a Democratic-nominated justice — chided those who brought the lawsuits for waiting until late September to file them. “The general election is now less than one week away. Training for poll workers has been completed. It would be impossible to retrain thousands of workers across our state within a matter of days,” she wrote.
A Wayne County judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Republican secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo that sought to disqualify absentee ballots in Detroit. The judge said the suit “failed dramatically,” and that the claims made by Karamo were “unsubstantiated and/or misinterpret Michigan election law.” “Plaintiffs have raised a false flag of election law violations and corruption concerning Detroit’s procedures for the November 8th election. This Court’s ruling takes down that flag,” a Wayne County circuit court ruling reads. “Plaintiffs’ failure to produce any evidence that the procedures for this November 8th election violate state or federal election law demonizes the Detroit City Clerk, her office staff, and the 1,200 volunteers working this election. These claims are unjustified, devoid of any evidentiary basis and cannot be allowed to stand.”
Missouri: Judge Jon Beetem temporarily blocked part of a new state law restricting civic groups from registering large groups of new voters. The Jefferson City circuit judge hit pause on rules that banned groups from paying volunteers to hand out voter registration applications, required groups seeking to sign up more than 10 voters to register with the state, and mandated those volunteers be Missouri voters themselves. Beetem wrote that the League of Women Voters and Missouri NAACP, who sued in August to block the law, had “sufficiently alleged” that the parts of the law in question “chill their protected speech.” The law, passed by the Republican-led legislature this past year, is House Bill 1878. “Plaintiffs argue, and (attorneys with the state) do not contest, that no other state has a restriction on voter engagement speech that even approaches the breadth of this statute,” Beetem wrote. “Such direct restraints on pure speech — and core political speech like encouraging political participation in particular ― are antithetical to the core tenets of freedom of speech.”
Nevada: Clark County District Court Judge Timothy Williams has ruled against the Republican National Committee’s legal request for Clark County to have equal political party representation on manual signature verification boards for mail ballots. Williams issued the order Thursday, a day after attorneys representing the RNC, Clark County and a cadre of Democratic groups argued the case following oral arguments from the parties. In the order, Williams wrote that the RNC’s arguments that the county’s hiring of temporary employees to assist with signature verification did not constitute the creation of a “special election board,” a term defined in state law that requires membership to “represent all political parties as equally as possible.” He added that it would be a “big stretch” to classify those temporary employees as members of a special election board. “…Temporary employees do not have power to make decisions on ballot-counting procedures,” the order states. “Consequently, the temporary employees simply perform ministerial functions for the County, and by extension, the State of Nevada.”
Early voting dates were added at a reservation on the Nevada-Idaho border after Shoshone-Paiute tribal members sued over equal access. The Elko County Clerk scheduled three days of early voting at the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Owyhee for the first time this year, then added five more at the end of October and early November as a result of the lawsuit. Owyhee will also have a ballot drop-box on Election Day. The lawsuit claimed that the limited early voting schedule “violates state law, and imposes constitutional burdens on their fundamental right to vote.” The Duck Valley tribes were assisted in the lawsuit by Four Directions Native Vote. “After meeting for several hours, the Tribes and Elko County settled the equal voting access lawsuit for all future elections with greatly expanded access for election 2022,” stated Four Directions.
New Jersey: Superior Court Judge William G. Mennen IV has ruled that a Hunterdon County woman who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2021 will be permitted to cast her first vote in next week’s general election even though her voter registration form was never received by the county Board of Elections. Karen L. testified that she had mailed a voter registration form last year and questioned her status when two family members received sample ballots and she had not. “It must gave got lost in the mail or something,” she told Mennen. Mennen said he found her testimony to be credible. “She is to be lauded for her efforts,” the judge stated.
New York: Dutchess County Supreme Court, Judge Christie D’Alessio has ordered that a polling place be established on the campus of Vassar College. The lawsuit was filed by the League of Women Voters, a Vassar College professor, and a Vassar College student, seeking a court order for Republican Elections Commissioner Erik Haight to abide by a state law requiring colleges with more than 300 students living on campus, to have a polling place on the college property. ’Alessio ruled that the law is clear in requiring a polling place on campus. The decision, in part, says, “This Court grants the petition in its entirety. The plain language of Election Law g 4-104[5-a] which includes the word ‘shall’ (as opposed to ‘may’ or ‘should’) specifically mandates the designation of a voting polling place on a college or university campus where, as here. the petitioner demonstrated that the college or university campus contains three hundred or more registrants to vote at an address on such college or university campus.”
Pennsylvania: On Saturday, the state Supreme Court unexpectedly issued an additional order in the vote-by-mail case it had ruled in earlier in the week. The new order clarified the court’s definition: Mail-in ballots are to be rejected in this election if the handwritten dates fall before Sept. 19, 2022, or after Nov. 8 (Election Day), and absentee ballots are to be rejected if they are dated before Aug. 30, 2022, or after Nov. 8. The court’s separate time frame for absentee ballots appears to come from conflating those votes with a different kind of absentee ballot — the ones sent to military and overseas voters, known as UOCAVA for the federal law that governs them — which are sent out 70 days before Election Day, which is Aug. 30 this year.
The NAACP, ACLU, and other political organizations are suing the Pennsylvania courts over mail-in ballots. They want mail-in ballots with improper dating to be counted. This comes just days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that they shouldn’t be counted after a lawsuit was filed by the Republican National Committee. The court ruled that undated ballots received at election offices must be set aside and not counted. Now, they are clarifying what “incorrectly dated” means. They are ballots with outer envelopes listing a date that falls outside the date range of September 19, 2022, through November 8, 2022.
York County has settled an injunction agreeing, among other things, to provide sample ballots in Spanish at all polling places and bi-lingual ballots in 18 precincts, to make translators available by phone to voters and poll workers, to provide signage at polling places in Spanish and to hire 20 poll workers to assist Spanish-speaking voters. The lawsuit arose from a survey that CASA conducted of voting practices, and adherence to language-access provisions in the Voting Rights Act, in York, Lancaster and Dauphin counties. The organization found problems in York and Lancaster counties. The lawsuit remains active. The settlement reached addresses issues brought up in the preliminary injunction, issues that could be resolved in time for the Nov. 8 election. Among those issues are providing bilingual ballots and access to assistance for Spanish-speaking voters in all of York County’s voting precincts.
South Dakota: A Minnehaha County judge will not stop the auditor’s office from counting absentee ballots on election day. Two people filed a civil lawsuit last week, asking for a temporary restraining order. They didn’t want mail-in ballots counted until the county auditor confirm that the people who requested them were properly registered. According to the South Dakota e-courts system, a judge issued an order saying the temporary restraining order is denied
Tennessee: After more than 200 Davidson County voters were given incorrect ballots during the early voting period, the Davidson County Election commission announced on Saturday procedures for Election Day intended to give those voters the opportunity to cast votes in their correct electoral districts. “We have posted important information on our website for all Davidson County voters,” said Jeff Roberts, Davidson County Administrator of Elections. “A red banner at the top of the page includes a link to ‘Important Election Information.’ When voters click on that link, they will find guidance for what to do if they voted early and what to do if they intend to vote on Election Day.” The information includes a list of voters who may have been assigned incorrect early voting ballots. Voters finding their name on the list can cast a provisional ballot on Election Day only at the Davidson County Election Commission office, 1417 Murfreesboro Pike in Nashville, not at assigned Election Day polling locations. The ACLU of Tennessee filed a lawsuit, naming as defendants Roberts, the members of the Davidson County Election Commission, Gov. Bill Lee, Secretary of State Tre Hargett and state election coordinator Mark Goins. Within an hour of the suit being filed, the parties reached a legal agreement.
Texas: After spending nearly a week in jail, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips — leaders of Texas-based right-wing voting activist group True the Vote — have been released. They’d been held for contempt of court since Halloween, having repeatedly refused to release the name of a man they called a “confidential FBI informant” who is a person of interest in a defamation and hacking case against them. The person remains unidentified. Their release came after True the Vote’s lawyers appealed the contempt order by federal district Judge Kenneth Hoyt to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, arguing the finding of contempt was in error and the pair should be released from jail. The appeals court granted their release but kept the remainder of Hoyt’s order in place.
The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday set the stage for a legal fight over whether to count ballots Harris County voters cast during an extended hour of voting ordered by a lower court. That lower court ordered that the state’s most populous county extend voting hours until 8 p.m. after several polling places were delayed in opening. The state’s highest civil court blocked that ruling and ordered Harris County to separate ballots cast by voters who were not in line by 7 p.m., the normal cutoff for voting in Texas. The Supreme Court’s order followed a request by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to reverse the lower court’s order. The Supreme Court posted the order on Twitter at 8:30 p.m. It’s unclear how many votes were cast during the extra hour of voting, but Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee raised the prospect that the state would ask for those votes to be thrown out. The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they would pursue such action. Voters who got in line after 7 p.m. were required to cast a provisional ballot, which the county had already said would take more time to process and would not be initially counted in election night returns. Harris County is home to nearly 2.6 million registered voters.
Virginia: Judge Thomas Horne sided with the Prince William County Republican Committee in a lawsuit it filed against Prince William County Registrar Eric Olsen and the Prince William County Electoral Board. The party argued that Olsen and the board broke the law by failing to ensure that the chief and assistant chief election officers at each polling place were evenly split between the parties. In response, Olsen and the electoral board contend they “doubled” the overall number of Republican election officers working the polls on Tuesday as a result of a targeted mailers sent over the summer. But they said they assigned chief and assistant chiefs based on workers’ experience with prior elections in an effort to ensure a smooth process on Election Day. The GOP Committee’s lawsuit stated the the party’s research into the voting records of election officers assigned to represent Republicans revealed that several had participated in past Democratic primaries. Virginia does not register voters according to political parties but keeps a record of voters’ participation in party primaries, which can be accessed for a fee from the Virginia Department of Elections.
A last-minute push to upend how Virginia counts its votes was dismissed Monday after the man behind the legal effort didn’t show up to court. James Renwick Manship filed an injunction to temporarily block the use of electronic voting machines used to count ballots in Virginia for years and have the Department of Elections “implement a state-wide Hand Count of Paper Ballots.” In his injunction, Manship called machines used to tabulate ballots in Virginia “exploitable” and “flawed” but did not provide specific evidence to back his claims. The Virginia Attorney General’s Office, led by Republican Jason Miyares, represented the state’s Department of Elections in the case. Miyares’ office argued in a motion to have the case thrown out that Manship’s allegations “are long on conspiracy and short on fact.”
Wisconsin: Former Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata, 45, of Milwaukee was charged with misconduct in public office, a felony, and three misdemeanor counts of making a false statement to obtain an absentee ballot. If convicted, Zapata faces up to 3 1/2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine on the Class I Felony count and six months behind bars and a $1,000 for each of the three misdemeanors, according to the complaint. Zapata was fired by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson this week after city officials discovered she had requested three military ballots and had them sent to the home of state Rep. Janel Brandtjen of Menomonee Falls.
The conservative Thomas More Society, on behalf of veterans and Waukesha County voters, filed a lawsuit Friday asking a court to order Wisconsin elections officials to sequester all military absentee and mail-in ballots. The lawsuit asks the Waukesha County Circuit Court for a temporary injunction requiring elections officials to set aside military ballots so their authenticity can be verified. The suit was motivated by the case of a Milwaukee Election Commission deputy administrator, who was fired after admitting to fraudulently requesting military ballots. Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Maxwell denied the request, calling the step a “drastic remedy” but also chiding the Wisconsin Elections Commission over its guidance to municipal clerks. “I think I made clear in my questioning that I felt that that was a drastic remedy, that I felt that it was at least at a minimum a temporary disenfranchisement of our military voters’ votes to say, ‘let’s put them on hold and let’s figure out after the fact whether or not there’s bad votes cast,’” Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Maxwell said at the end of a two-hour hearing.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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