#election security

[onlytiktoks]

[welcometoqueer]

I haven’t really seen any of the more recent U.S. election news hitting tumblr yet so here’s some updates (now edited with sources added):

There’s evidence of Trump cheating and interfering with the election.

Possible Russian interference.

Mail-in ballots are not being counted or “recognized” in multiple (notably swing) states.

30+ bomb threats were called in and shut down polling stations on Election Day.

20+ million votes are still unaccounted for, and that’s just to have the same voter turnout as 2020.

There was record voter turnout and new/first-time voter registration this year. We definitely should be well over the turnout in 2020.

U.S. citizens are using this site to demand, not only a recount, but a complete investigation into election fraud and interference for the reasons stated above:

Contact Us | The White House

Contact the President, Vice President, get help with a Federal Agency, or request a Presidential Greeting.

Here is what I submitted as an example:

An investigation for election interference and fraud is required. We desperately need a recount or even a revote. The American people deserve the right to a free and fair election. There has been evidence unveiled of Trump cheating and committing election fraud which is illegal. There is some evidence of possible Russian interference. At least 30+ bomb threats were called in to polling places. Multiple, notably swing states, have ballots unaccounted for and voting machines not registering votes. Ballots and ballot boxes were tampered with and burned. Over 20 million votes that we know of are unaccounted for. With record turnout and new voter registration this year, there should be no possibility that there are less votes than even in the 2020 election.

Sources (working on finding more links but if anyone wants to add info, it’s appreciated):

FBI addressing Russian interference and bomb threats:

FBI Statement on Bomb Threats to Polling Locations | Federal Bureau of Investigation

The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None

Emails released by Rachael Bellis (private account, can’t share original tweet) confirming Trump committing election fraud:

Pennsylvania's Centre County officials say they are working with their ballot scanner vendor to figure out why the county's mail-in ballot data is "not being recognized when uploaded to the elections software:”

Wisconsin recount:

'Human error' forces recount of 30,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee as Trump accuses Pennsylvania of 'disinformation'

The Milwaukee Election Commission, 'out of an abundance of caution,' will delay the reporting of about 105,000 absentee ballots that could d

[ID:

Multiple screenshots and images.

The first is a screenshot with a link and information for contacting the White House directly regarding election fraud. The instructions include choosing to leave a comment to President Joe Biden directly and to select election security as the reason.

The screenshot then instructs people to include any or all of the following information in a paragraph as a comment to the president:

32 fake bomb threats were called into Democratic leaning poll places, rendering polling places closed for at least an hour.

A lot of people reporting their ballots were not counted for various reasons.

This all occurred in swing states.

This is too coincidental that these things happen and swing in his favor after months of hinting at foul play.

Directly state that an investigation for tampering, interference, fraud is required, not just a recount.

The second image is from the FBI Twitter account that reads:

The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains. None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far. https://t.co/j3YfajVK1m — FBI (@FBI) November 5, 2024

The next four Gmail screenshots of an email sent to Rachael Bellis from Chris T. Spackman that read together as follows:

Dear BELLIS, RACHAEL E., The Dauphin County Board of Elections received a challenge to your absentee ballot you applied for in the November 5, 2024 General Election. The challenge argues that a provision of the Pennsylvania Election Code takes precedence over the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), which requires states and counties to permit U.S. citizens who move overseas to vote by absentee ballot for federal offices based on their last U.S. residential address.

The full text of the challenge that was filed appears below this email.

You may respond to the challenge in any of the following ways:

1. Call the Bureau of Registration and Election at [phone];

2. Email a statement to the Bureau at Election [email protected]. Any statement you submit regarding the period during which you lived in Dauphin County, any family or connections that you still have here, and why you are now residing abroad would be read into the record.

3. Appear in person at a Board of Elections hearing scheduled for Friday, November 8 at a time to be determined in the Commissioners Public Hearing Room, 4th floor of Dauphin County Administration Building, 2 S 20d St, Harrisburg, PA 17111. The meeting is also likely to be livestreamed on Facebook on the Dauphin County channel.

Sincerely,

Christopher T Spackman

TEXT OF CHALLENGE BEGINS

Dear Dauphin County Board of Elections,

I am submitting this challenge to an absentee ballot application pursuant to 25 Pa. Stat.

3146.8(f).

25 Pa. Stat. 3146.8(f) Any person challenging an application for an absentee ballot, an absentee ballot, an application for a mail-in ballot or a mail-in ballot for any of the reasons provided in this act shall deposit the sum of ten dollars ($10.00) in cash with the county board, which sum shall only be refunded if the challenge is sustained or if the challenge is withdrawn within five (5) days after the primary or election. If the challenge is dismissed by any lawful order then the deposit shall be forfeited. The county board shall deposit all deposit money in the general fund of the…

The rest of the forwarded email is cut off.

The last image is a screenshot of the official statement from the Centre County, Pennsylvania Board of Commissioners released on November 6, 2024 that states:

Centre County Working with Ballot Scanner Vendor to Export Election Results.

(Bellefonte, PA) -Centre County Elections Office is working continuously to provide mail-in ballot data in order to post unofficial results.

To this point, all ballots have been scanned, including all mail-in ballots.

Centre County's Election team and IT team have identified that the data are successfully being exported from the mail-in ballot scanners, but that the data is not being recognized when uploaded to the elections software.

Centre County's Administrator, John Franek, Jr. stated, "We have not stopped working, and we will continue to work until unofficial results are posted and reported to the Pennsylvania Department of State."

As a next step, Centre County has begun working with the equipment vendor to adjust configurations to make the two systems-the mail-in ballot scanner and the elections software where data are uploaded -compatible with one another.

We will provide updates as we make progress.

/end ID]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Georgia’s voting technology blunder

Angelenos! I’ll be at the Los Angeles Festival of Books TOMORROW (Apr 19) for a panel called “Nature or Nurture: How Humans and AI Are Changing Each Other” with Adam Becker, Joanne McNeil, and Lucas Cantor Santiago.

Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn't exist.

The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it's far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a "standard" voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job.

Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE – largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion – they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election.

Instead, they decided they were going to publish a "descriptive standard." Rather than designing a new standard, they'd write down the specs of their own products – the same products that were considered so defective they needed to be replaced before the election – and call that the standard.

That was my first encounter with this issue as an activist. I had just started at EFF and a lot of our supporters were IEEE members, who were appalled to see their professional association being used to launder this incredibly politically salient, technically incoherent scam. We got a ton of IEEE members to write to the board, who shut down the standards committee and kicked the voting machine companies to the curb.

The voting machine companies weren't done, though. Diebold – one of the leaders in the cartel – knew that its voting machines were defective. They'd crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.

This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold's voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.

Diebold didn't dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company's copyright.

Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send "takedown notices" to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn't remove the content "expeditiously," they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.

Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages.

(Incidentally: anyone who tells you that "online safety" requires us to make online platforms liable for their users' speech needs to explain how this wouldn't empower every crooked company whose dirty laundry had ended up online wouldn't just do what Diebold did. It's not technically insanity to do the same thing over again in expectation of a different outcome, but it is awfully stupid and reckless.)

That might have been the end of things, except for the kids at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Two students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, were outraged by Diebold and they had accounts on Swarthmore's webserver. So they uploaded thousands of copies of the leaked memos, but linked to just one of them from a page about the leak. As soon as that copy was deleted by Swarthmore's webmasters in response to a DMCA takedown from Diebold, the students updated the link to point to another copy. And another. And another.

That's where EFF got involved. We repped the Online Policy Group, whose page linking to the Swarthmore resources was taken down by a Diebold notice. We won. The memos became a matter of public record. The Swarthmore kids started a nationwide network called "Students for Free Culture." It was pretty danged cool.

That wasn't the end of the Diebold story, though. Diebold was and is a very diversified conglomerate that made a lot of tabulating machines: ATMs, cash-registers, medical monitoring devices…and voting machines. Every one of these machines produced a paper-tape of its tabulations as an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct its calculations if it crashed…except the voting machines. The voting machines that kept crashing, and whose crashes presented a serious risk to the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of the worst electoral crisis in the country's history.

Diebold's stated reason for this was that adding a paper tape was haaaard (even though all its other machines had paper audit tapes). Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden O’Dell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president":

https://fairvote.org/diebold-partisanship-and-public-interest-elections/

Now, to be clear, I don't think that O'Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that's the Supreme Court's job). Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.

In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because they suck. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/

The hits just kept on coming:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120655/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1

At Defcon, the amazing Matt Blaze has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:

https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp

Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology…right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They told so many outlandish lies about this that Fox ended up paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems#Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox_News_Network

That's when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history's most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies – who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics – were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

There's a name for this: it's called "schismogenesis": when one group of people define themselves in opposition to someone else. If the other team does X, then your team has to oppose X, even if you all liked X until a couple minutes ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

This schismogenic reversal persists to this very day. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage.

Which is bad. It's bad because we are going into another election season where the stakes are – incredibly – even higher than Bush v Gore, and electoral authorities and state legislatures are making the world's most unforced errors in their voting machine procurement decisions, and if you've conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.

Just because some voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are good, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.

Take, for example, Princeton's Andrew Appel, a computer scientist who's been publishing well-informed, well-documented warnings about defects in voting machines for years and years. Appel's latest is an alarming note about Georgia's new plan to "tabulate" ballots using OCR software:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/04/10/ballot-tabulation-by-uploading-scanned-images-for-ocr-is-quite-insecure/

The Georgia legislature has wisely banned the use of QR codes on the paper ballots generated by touchscreen voting machines. We have, at long last, progressed to the point where we use "ballot marking devices" (BMDs) that produce a paper record that can be hand-counted. The problem is that voters barely ever glance at these paper ballots before dropping them in the box to make sure the choices they made on the touchscreen are correctly reflected on the ballot – only 7% of voters carefully inspect their ballots!

This problem is greatly exacerbated if these ballot papers are tabulated by a machine that reads a QR code or barcode, rather than interpreting the human-readable information on the ballot. People are even less likely to pull out their phones and scan the QR code to ensure it matches the words on the paper. That means that a BMD could output different choices in the QR code than it prints in the human-readable part – and the Dominion BMD machines they use in Georgia run outdated software that's super-hackable:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/02/24/georgia-still-using-tragicomically-insecure-voting-system/

So Georgia's state leg passed Senate Bill 189, which establishes that "The text portion of the paper ballot marked and printed by the electronic ballot marker indicating the elector’s selection shall constitute the official ballot and shall constitute the official vote for purposes of vote tabulation." In other words, you can't count by scanning QR codes, you have to actually interpret the human-readable text on these ballots.

These machines still suck, to be clear (the fact that they don't suck for the mypillovian reasons that Tucker Carlson believes doesn't mean they're good) – but thanks to SB189, they are way less dangerous to democracy than they might be.

But not if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gets his way. Raffensperger is another guy who was drafted into The Resistance(TM) after he refused to commit election fraud for Trump, but he's also not good. He can still be terrible in other ways – and he is.

Raffensperger has announced his plan to circumvent the Georgia legislature by using Dominion ICX touchscreens to produce ballots with QR codes, which will then be tabulated in Dominion ICP scanners – but then he's going to "verify" the tabulation by running those same ballots through optical character recognition (OCR) software.

As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.

First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit? As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image files–just replace the ballots they don’t like with copies of the ones they do like."

Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit – a step that Raffensperger has not explained. And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."

So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.

And here's the stupidest part: as Appel explains, there is a much more secure way to do this, and it's very cheap:

Just use their existing Dominion ICP (polling-place) scanners to count preprinted, hand-marked optical-scan "bubble ballots" that the voter has marked with a pen.

This is what other states are doing. As Appel writes, "This doesn’t even require a software upgrade of any kind. Although it would be a fine idea to install a software upgrade that addresses known security vulnerabilities in the ICX and ICP, the ICP can count hand-marked ballots with or without the upgrade."

This is a purely unforced error, in other words. As such, it's part of a series of shitty vote-tech choices that politicians and officials have been making since Bush v Gore. Truly, we live in the stupidest timeline.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/18/dominion-sucks-actually/#just-peachy

[justinspoliticalcorner]

They’re Seizing the Ballots and Voter Rolls

An FBI raid yesterday in Fulton County is a dark harbinger of what’s to come

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

We have a five-alarm fire in Georgia over voting records. And it comes right on the heels of the DOJ’s efforts over the weekend to extort Minnesota out of its voter data.

On Wednesday, the FBI seized paper ballots and voter data from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. Agents carted away some 700 boxes based on a dubious search warrant that claimed, without any apparent factual support, that there was probable cause to believe the records contained evidence of a crime. Never mind that they were already the subject of an existing civil suit by the DOJ, which had resulted in the judge sealing them. And never mind that the statute of limitations for any “election crimes” has likely already run. The latest escalation carries grim implications for November’s midterms. The 2020 election in Georgia was ground zero for Trump’s efforts to overturn the national election results. They included Trump’s direct pressure upon Georgia officials to “find” him 11,780 votes. His obsession with having lost that state has now led to yesterday’s dramatic and unprecedented seizure of Georgia’s election materials. Based on what we already know, we must assume that Trump, with a big assist from the DOJ, intends to use the seized materials to reassert long-disproven claims to lay the groundwork for similar assertions of fraud in this November’s midterms. And we now know the DOJ will assist Trump in seizing voting records going forward, meaning 2026 ballots and voter rolls across the nation are at high risk, too.

What we know so far about the FBI raid

On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at Fulton County’s elections warehouse—long the site of fantastical right-wing conspiracies over election fraud. The Bureau confirmed it was conducting “court-authorized law enforcement action,” and the warrant indicated the search was part of a criminal investigation into potential violations of federal laws covering the preservation of election records and illegal efforts to defraud voters. Federal agents were allegedly authorized to seize physical ballots from the 2020 election, along with tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls. The seized materials comprise an extraordinarily broad sweep, targeting the very building blocks of a certified presidential election. The timing of the raid raises suspicions. The warrant was signed by a federal magistrate judge in Atlanta less than a week after Trump, speaking in Davos, Switzerland, publicly reasserted claims that the 2020 election was rigged. It also occurred on the heels of Pam Bondi’s extortion letter to Gov. Walz demanding Minnesota’s state voter data. And just last week, Kash Patel fired the FBI official, Paul W. Brown, a special agent who was in charge of the Atlanta, Georgia office, though his firing could have been for unrelated reasons.

[...]

Unpacking the context of the raid

So why are Trump and his DOJ focused on Fulton County, Georgia once more, such that they have taken the extraordinary step of seizing voting records from over five years ago? For starters, Trump personally has never gotten over his loss in Georgia in the 2020 election. Nor has he ever forgiven Republican officials in that state for confirming Biden’s victory, nor the Fulton County prosecutor’s office for bringing a criminal RICO case against him and his co-conspirators for their attempted election subversion.

A few things should be restated for the record. Trump’s loss in Georgia was confirmed by GOP state officials three times, including in a final hand count. The Trump campaign nevertheless pushed false claims of election fraud using video debunked by Georgia’s own election officials. They even targeted and endangered the lives of election workers, notably Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who later prevailed in their defamation civil suit against Rudy Giuliani. Two months after that November 2020 election, runoff elections were held for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, both of which were won by the Democratic candidates, namely Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. This further confirmed that the entire state of Georgia was beginning to shift blue, and that Trump’s easier loss was was consistent with political trends. Now that Trump is president again, he is determined to press criminal charges based on long-debunked claims of election fraud. Those charges ultimately may not go anywhere, given the amount of time that has passed. But that won’t stop the DOJ under Pam Bondi from drumming up allegations anyway and attempting to tarnish election officials and workers, once again, with bogus and stale allegations.

The FBI’s raid and seizure of 2020 election voting records of Fulton County, Georgia’s election HQ this week is dark and disturbing.

This portends to the possibility of the Trump Regime attempting to rig elections to keep the GOP in control of the House and/or Senate next year, even though they would likely lose control of at least the House.

See Also:

The Big Picture (Jay Kuo): Bondi’s Shakedown Gives Away The Game

[ivygorgon]

Vote NO on the SAVE Act!

Text SIGN PKFOYU to 50409 to send this to your officials.

An open letter to the U.S. House of Representatives

Vote NO on the SAVE Act!

8,228 so far! Help us get to 10,000 signers!

I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 22, the so-called “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” (SAVE) Act. While this bill is framed as a measure to combat voter fraud, it is, in reality, a voter suppression effort that creates unnecessary barriers to voting and disenfranchises millions of Americans.

The SAVE Act would require voters to present narrow forms of “documentary proof of citizenship,” such as a passport or birth certificate, to participate in federal elections. This would disproportionately harm:

- Up to 150 million Americans who do not have a passport.

- Approximately 69 million women citizens who do not have a birth certificate with their current legal name on it.

- Elderly Americans, who are the least likely to hold passports.

Additionally, in 7 states, less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport – Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

The SAVE Act is a solution in search of a problem. Worse, it would erode the fundamental right to vote, silencing the voices of vulnerable communities under the guise of election security. Rather than advancing harmful legislation like the SAVE Act, Congress should focus on protecting and expanding voting rights by supporting measures such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

One of the foundational values of our democracy is the idea that every person is entitled to a vote – a say in the direction of our nation. I urge you and your colleagues to work towards that founding ideal. Thanks.

▶ Created on February 6 by Jess Craven · 8,228 signers in the past 7 days

📱 Text SIGN PKFOYU to 50409 to sign!

🤯 Text FOLLOW JESSCRAVEN101 to 50409

[saywhat-politics]

Election systems feared to be vulnerable as Trump administration cuts workers tasked with security

Cuts to the U.S. cybersecurity agency and FBI affected the federal workers tasked with stopping foreign interference in elections.

Over the last month, the U.S. government has worked quickly to pause, disband and dismantle the U.S. effort to fight foreign meddling in elections, raising concern among federal lawmakers and election officials across the country who rely on the federal cybersecurity agency and its counterparts to warn them about attacks on election systems. 

First came a flurry of notices forcing out Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency personnel who are tasked with stopping foreign interference in U.S. elections — at least a dozen have been put on leave or fired over the past month. Then, on Attorney General Pam Bondi's first day in office on Feb. 5, she disbanded the FBI task force targeting foreign influence operations originating from places like Russia, China and Iran. 

The focus on election security has been turned toward the past, rather than the future. In an internal memo earlier this month, CISA's acting director announced an internal investigation to assess every position and program that touches election security — including election misinformation and disinformation — dating back to President Trump's first term in office, with findings to be delivered in a final report on March 6. 

[juicetrump2]

The next election could be less secure - Salon.com

Despite GOP talk of election integrity, the midterms could be less secure than 2024.

[thedailyelm]

Let’s talk election safety!

Today I was getting lunch, and my mom was watching the LULAC webinar on elections. I was about to go back to work when I heard Nevada Secretary of State, Cisco Aguilar say that Senator Catherine Cortez Masto has been instrumental in fighting to to keep ICE away from polling stations, by restoring them as sensitive locations.

Safe to say I did not know she was working on that, and so I ran to grab my computer and started taking notes.

I am SO glad I did, cause this call was INCREDIBLE.

First, and certainly least important, I learned that the only two Latino Secretaries of State, Nevada’s Aguilar and Arizona’s Adrian Fontes are literally cousins. Their family should be very proud cause it’s so clear they care a whole lot.

Let’s start with Aguilar, cause he spoke first.

We have not been talking about Secretary of State races a whole lot. In fact, if you asked me who was running….in any state….I’d have nothing for you. That’s a problem. They are our best line of defense against Republican bullshit before, during and after elections.

Luckily, just because we aren’t paying attention, or maybe just me, doesn’t mean they aren’t acting. They are focusing on keeping the seats we have, and gaining some seats as well.

There are 26 states with SoS elections in 2026, we have 13 states we need to hold and 13 we could flip. Find out if you live in one of those states and consider this election as important as who you vote for in Congress. Who we vote for for SoS in ‘26, determines how we are able to vote in ‘28.

But there’s also the matter of getting people to feel safe voting at all. One of the best ways to do this is for everyone who is able to sign up to be a poll worker, especially Latino, AANHPI and Black people, because it’s easier to get someone to feel safer when they see someone who looks like them in a position of authority in the room.

He also said that it’s important to communicate directly with voters and become “trusted messengers.” For him, that means making ballots available and easy to access in a variety of languages, also getting texts in that language too.

He said especially in terms of Latinos, in Nevada, 1/3 of voters are Latino, but 50% of young students are, meaning Nevada is rapidly becoming more Latino, so he’s putting a lot of time and effort into make it as easy as possible for them to start businesses and feel like the SoS is a safe and helpful resource.

Fontes echoed alot of what Aguilar said, but also focused more heavily on the legal and legislative side.

He started by saying “now is the time to remain uncomfortable.” These fights are going to be hard and painful but we can’t shy away from them. Everything that happened in the past week with Swalwell is a testament to that.

He is putting focus into making sure that all law enforcement agencies in AZ know that it is illegal for anyone with a weapon to be in a polling place. He also mentioned that Republicans tried to introduce a bill that would change that, and thanks to a whole lot of pushback, it failed. Public pressure works!

He shouted out special elections and their importance, like the recent election that kept Turning Point candidates off the Salt Water River board and how we have to highlight and support election administrators at all levels.

Finally, he elaborated on what Aguilar said about communication.

He said becoming a trusted messenger isn’t about repeating the same message over and over again till it’s believed, but rather showing that you’re trustworthy through work in other areas. Each SoS office does several things. It’s important to put as much time and energy and focus into those other parts as elections. Someone is more likely to trust the safety and security of the election process if they have easily been helped by the office before.

It’s also worth mentioning that the disinformation hasn’t changed, just the method of spreading the misleading message. And both Democracy Defender’s Fund’s Norm Eisen as well as League of Women Voter’s Celina Stewart reiterated this along with Fontes.

They are prepared for EVERYTHING.

Eisen said:

We are gonna peacefully but lawfully fight in the court of law but also in the court of public opinion to explain what it’s all about, and we are gonna win!

And Fontes explained that part of the importance of all of these illegal rulings is to help Americans understand what is legal and what is illegal, even when the president doesn’t care. I hadn’t thought of that angle before. Most people don’t know what’s in the constitution, the more people who know the more informed voters are.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this. Stewart reminded us all that Trump’s mail in voting executive order happened because he’s losing. Because what those who are fighting like hell on the ground are doing. It IS working, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

So, now that you’re fired up and ready to fight, let’s go win some elections! Cause, your vote is your voice and that voice is your superpower, but only when you use it!