This article originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
New From ProPublica
Millions of Mail-In Votes Have Already Been Cast in Battleground States. Track Their Progress Here.
ProPublica and The Guardian are tracking mail-in votes in battleground states — how many have been requested, how many have been returned and how many have been rejected. Read the story.
Pennsylvania’s Rejection of 372,000 Ballot Applications Bewilders Voters and Strains Election Staff
Most rejected applications were deemed duplicates because voters had unwittingly checked a request box during the primary. The administrative nightmare highlights the difficulty of ramping up mail-in voting on the fly. Read the story.
Stories From Electionland Partners
Washington Post: Long lines mark the first day of early voting in Georgia as voters flock to the polls.
News & Observer: Black voters more likely to be left in limbo by NC absentee ballot dispute.
Postindustrial: Some in PA remain confused over mail-in election process.
WFSU: Sealed Absentee Ballot Return Envelopes Spark Concern From Leon County Voters.
WESA: Postcards On Voting Cause Confusion Among Some Pennsylvanians.
WESA: Your Questions On Pennsylvania Voter Registration, Mail-In Ballots, And Voting In Person, Answered.
Washington Post: Early voting begins in Texas with high turnout, despite new legal developments on voting access.
NJ Spotlight News: Missing ballots, sealed envelopes — NJ’s first mail-in election sees glitches.
CBS2 Chicago: Cook County Acknowledges Backlog As Many Voters Get Message That System Can’t Verify Their Registration.
KJRH: Tulsa County voter gets replacement ballot after he thinks first one goes missing.
News & Observer: Worried that your mail-in ballot won’t count? Here’s what you need to know.
Vote by Mail News
California’s Republican Party admitted to placing unofficial ballot drop boxes at undisclosed locations around the state after reports emerged in Fresno, Los Angeles, and Orange counties. A state party spokesman claimed the boxes were legal under the state’s “ballot harvesting” law, which allows third parties to help take ballots to the polls. But in a cease-and-desist letter, California’s attorney general said the drop boxes were missing crucial security features and could leave the party vulnerable to charges of tampering. (CBS Sacramento)
Nearly half of the North Carolina ballots that have been flagged for errors and need to be “cured” belong to Black voters. But the cure process has been suspended as a legal battle over state voting law between Democrats and Republicans makes its way through the courts. (Washington Post)
Voters in seven states — including Virginia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania — had already returned more absentee ballots as of this week than the states saw by the end of the 2016 election. (Wall Street Journal)
More than 80 million absentee ballots had already been requested nationwide as of October 14, but some critical states — including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — won’t allow election workers to begin processing them all until Election Day, which could lead to delays in getting results. (New York Times)
Starting Monday, Denver voters could watch election workers process ballots live on a video stream at denvervotes.org. (Associated Press)
Across Pennsylvania, voters are experiencing a deluge of election-related mail and ballot applications sent by third-party groups. Some forms have been pre-filled with inaccurate information, prompting confused calls to already busy election offices. (WITF)
At a conservative conference in D.C. in August, speakers pushed back on mail-in voting, promoted ballot harvesting and worried about Democrats stealing the election. (The Washington Post)
Voting Challenges This Week
A federal judge extended Virginia’s voter registration deadline to Thursday, after online voter systems crashed on what was supposed to be the final day of registration. The Tuesday outage was caused by a severed fiber optic line, which crews accidentally cut while doing utility work. (WDBJ, Washington Post)
Nearly 29,000 people in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, may have received the wrong ballot as the result of a printing error by an outside vendor. Voters’ names were matched to the wrong municipalities and voting districts, county officials said. New ballots will be issued the week of October 19. (WESA)
New Jersey voters are having trouble with the state’s online system for tracking their absentee ballots. Although the platform will technically accept three different identification numbers to help track down ballots, it won’t show a result unless users put in the exact ID they used to register to vote. (WNYC)
Two state lawmakers are pushing for a refund from the printing company that accidentally sent thousands of Brooklyn voters the wrong ballot return envelopes. New York City’s Board of Elections had awarded Phoenix Printing a no-bid, $4.6 million contract to print absentee ballots, which one assemblywoman slammed as a “sweetheart deal.” (The City)
About 1,000 voters in Delaware County, Ohio, received two absentee ballots in the mail due to a “computer glitch,” according to election officials. Voters are being contacted by phone and by mail to make sure they only use one ballot. (ABC 6)
More than 1,300 Charleston voters received incorrect absentee ballots; officials say new ballots will arrive within days. (The State)
The Latest on Poll Security
A private security firm is recruiting former Special Operations soldiers to guard polling places and businesses in Minnesota during the election, despite the objections of state and local officials. (The Washington Post)
Tens of thousands of volunteers have signed up for a GOP polling watching effort. Per Politico, poll watchers will “monitor everything from voting machines to the processing of ballots to checking voter identification,” but are not allowed to interact directly with voters. (Politico)
Election officials in central Florida are training for possible disruptions, or even violence, on Election Day. (Orlando Sentinel)
Republican lawmakers are pushing back on a North Carolina State Board of Elections memo that directed local officials not to station uniformed law enforcement officers at polling places. (The News & Observer)
Misinformation on Voting
New research shows that social media influencers are helping amplify misinformation on voting. (AP)
Officials in Alabama are investigating complaints of people going door-to-door, asking voters to sign blank absentee ballot applications and provide personal information. (Dothan Eagle)
Scammers are mimicking a ballot-tracking text message service. (NBC San Diego)
USPS officials say a surge of packages from Amazon’s annual Prime Day won’t interfere with delivering ballots. (CNN)
Experts are more worried about disinformation, not coronavirus or cybersecurity, derailing the election. (Roll Call)
Landscapers Charles Harvey (left) and Louis Charleston, both with Big Oak Lawn Maintenance, remove vines and other debris from an abandoned Gallatin Street property in Jackson. The property will be renovated into a WiFi hotspot/event space and part of a new development, The Jackson Tech District.
Nashlie Sephus/photo by Terrence Wells, 242 Creative
Driving through the edges of downtown Jackson, Mississippi, as a kid, Nashlie Sephus was fascinated with a particular abandoned factory warehouse she called “the barn.”
The barn is still stark in size and stature, towering over a major thoroughfare that’s more highly trafficked than nearly every other street in the city, but has suffered from decades of divestment despite being flanked by Jackson State University and the city’s business district. Dissected by the state’s main railroad corridor that houses Jackson’s Amtrak station and Town Creek that winds through downtown to feed the Pearl River, Sephus says North Gallatin Street is the perfect spot for the city to re-envision its future and to invest in her home.
But until recently, the property sat abandoned like much of the street and surrounding area. Sephus, 35, bought it in September along with 12 accompanying acres to create what she’s dubbed the “Jackson Tech District” — a block of now-unused industrial property she’s morphing into a technology district, mixing non- and for-profit space to create a resource, playground and potential development anchor for the community.
“I believe in all the benefits of having come from a place like Jackson and being born in Mississippi. There’s not a person who knows me who doesn’t know that I’m from Mississippi and I love to brag on it and help change people’s stereotypes,” she said. Having lived on both coasts and worked with people all over the world in the tech industry, “I like to put that front and center.”
Sephus has dedicated her career to technology equity. A Mississippi State University graduate in computer engineering, she now works for Amazon reconfiguring data patterns that show implicit bias. She also launched a non-profit in Jackson two years ago called The Bean Path, dedicated to helping everyone from children to small business owners access tech tools they need through coding and engineering programing, “tech hours” at local libraries and grant-making to encourage STEM growth in schools.
The Bean Path will own and operate arts and culture programming, tech classes and events in two of the seven buildings across the tech hub’s new district. Mixed-use development comprising housing, offices, restaurants and collaborative work spaces are planned for the other buildings, all revolving around the idea of leveling the playing field with dedicated space for and open access to tech tools.
“This (technology) is such a huge infrastructure and a part of our daily lives, it’s very important for us to keep up and not be left behind,” she said. “I think it’s really important for me to make sure I’m doing everything I can, being that I’m an expert in this industry, to make sure that other people like me have opportunities to be successful in this field and also to bridge the gap to help people with their everyday lives.”
In Jackson, classes are still virtual but resources are scarce and COVID-19 emotional and physical tolls are high, exacerbated by longstanding housing and health inequities. “(We were) thinking about kids that may need somewhere to access the internet, they need to rent laptops for a day and access a tutor, because not all parents are about that tutoring life,” Sephus said.
Landscapers Charles Harvey (left) and Louis Charleston, both with Big Oak Lawn Maintenance, remove vines and other debris from an abandoned Gallatin Street property in Jackson. The property will be renovated into a WiFi hotspot/event space called, The Jackson Tech District.
Designs for the same property as part of Jackson Tech District / rendering by Sophia Parker with Dragonfly Design Center
She added this type of strategic community planning and investment in the community has traditionally been missing from big Jackson development projects. “We can provide them a space for them to come, this belongs to the community just as much as it belongs to me. I want to make everybody a part of that, I think engaging the community is one of the biggest pieces that might be missing from that downtown area.”
As a computer engineer focused on machine learning, she looks for patterns and, often more importantly, diversions from those patterns to help artificial intelligence course-correct for bias. For AI, patterns determine everything, like the types of ads you see on social media, what kind of music and TV shows streaming services suggest for you and which routes self-driving cars pick.
But patterns meant to teach AI can also be deceiving and discriminatory if they only reflect certain groups — and it all revolves around what dataset the tech pulls from. Research shows facial recognition software works best for white men and misidentifies Black faces more often.
For AI to recognize and learn from situations, it uses information from previous datasets — when it encounters something new, the bias defaults to reject or mis-categorize it unless it fits in with pre-existing patterns. AI can be biased because the information it has to learn from is biased, particularly when it comes to race, gender and social inequity.
Sephus works on Amazon Web Services’ AI team to detect inequities in algorithms and retrain them to discern differences. Essentially, her team works to identify and recalibrate fairness within data patterns, such as facial recognition and how bank loans are awarded.
“Anything outside of those patterns shows up as an anomaly and so we’re looking at things to detect faces, even to detect my voice. If you haven’t ‘trained your algorithm’ on voices of people from the South, it probably won’t work as well for people who sound like us,” she said.
Sephus experienced the bias inherent to bank loan algorithms firsthand over the last 18 months when she fought for, and was ultimately denied, financing to buy up the now-abandoned property in downtown Jackson that she plans to develop into the tech hub.
“For me having come from Amazon, I had a startup successful acquisition, I have access to a lot of capital, a lot of it is my own — I just realized sometimes it doesn’t matter how much money you have. The banks don’t care, they’re looking for certain trends and patterns,” she said.
It took the then-landowner agreeing to owner financing and Ridgeland-based Butler Snow law firm committing to pro-bono representation to close the deal, she says. A year and half after deciding to make the tech hub reality, Sephus is breaking ground on the new project. She says it stands to not only revolutionize the community and its capital, but also transform Jackson’s infrastructure and development to be from a community, rather than just for it — issues the nearby Farish Street has been plagued with.
“I am a fairly young person, I’m a Black female. I don’t know many other people who look like me who are similar to me, who own property and are doing the same thing in the downtown area,” she said. “I think that’s kind of what it takes — for somebody who thinks differently with a different background to come in and, as we say in the start-up world, disrupt … I’m crazy enough to believe that we can pull this off.”
She lives and works in Atlanta, but is spending a lot of time home in Jackson to get the project going and funded, and is not new to homegrown non-profit work, like The Bean Path that will spearhead community programming for the new tech district. She says she hopes more infrastructure recognizes that tech equity is more than just the biases in technology itself, but access to it, like universal high speed internet access.
Jackson Tech District design/ rendering by Sophia Parker with Dragonfly Design Center
She sees the tech hub as an inflection point for the area that will not only bring economic development and impact for kids who benefit from the tech resources, but with classes, trainings and tutoring she thinks it will bring workforce skills development for people going to work within the tech industry, and increase the area’s property value and infrastructure along the way. One of her more-pressing goals is to turn the barn event space into a safe WiFi hotspot for students’ virtual learning needs.
“Especially given the things that have happened this year in terms of COVID, in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement, I think the time is now,” she said. “I just want people to understand that it shouldn’t be this hard and that I am dedicated to making sure that I bring the community along in this process and educating them on how I’m going about it and how they can also do the same thing … you can do it. Get a good support system. I definitely have more than my fair share of people that are supporting me, and that I attribute my success to. I want to be that person for the next generation.”
We are seeing an outpouring of donations from individuals, corporations and foundations that began to grow as soon as protests and other activities in support of racial and social justice started to spread across the country.
Floyd’s GoFundMe memorial campaign has garnered more donations than any other campaign in the online platform’s history, raising over $14 million with 500,000 individual donors from 140 countries worldwide. Many of these gifts to the impacted families of police violence were for $5 and few were for $50,000 or more.
2. Direct support for grassroots organizations
After Memorial Day weekend, when Floyd died while in custody of the Minneapolis police, many Black-led grassroots organizations began to draw much higher levels of support as the protests garnered more participation and attention.
For example, when protests erupted, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which advocates for a more equitable system of cash bail, turned its attention to bailing out arrested protesters. Once the fund reached a total of $20 million in donations, its organizers urged donors to support Black-led organizations.
Other grassroots organizations and networks also received support, such as the National Bail Fund Network, which received $80 million in donations in late spring.
Even before the protests erupted, the Movement for Black Lives had received $5 million in the first five months of 2020 to support Black communities affected by the pandemic and to address broader issues of racial equity. This was nearly double the $2.7 million the group, founded in 2014 following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, raised in all of 2019, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
The Libra Foundation announced that a dozen grant-making organizations were joining together to give a total of $36 million to Black-led organizations and social movements like The Black Youth Project and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance.
These numbers provide only a partial estimate of total giving to these causes, and it will take at least until mid-2021 for the IRS to begin to release the official records and statistics needed for a fuller picture of giving to these groups. Based on data from Candid, a research group, institutional funders and large donors have contributed $5.9 billion for organizations primarily engaged in in racial equity work to date.
3. Shoring up HBCUs
Historically Black colleges and universities, often called HBCUs, and related groups that fund scholarships for the students who attend them, are getting more donations in 2020.
All told, the roughly 100 HBCUs have a total of only $2 billion in their endowments. By comparison, 54 predominantly white colleges and universities have $2 billion or more in their own endowment.
In 2018, for example, there were seven of these major gifts totaling $48 million. In contrast, there were at least 33 of these donations by mid-September of 2020, totaling $347 million, according a list of these donations of $1 million or more compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and tracking by statistician Xiao Han of additional news reports and public information disclosed by donors and the schools.
Corporate giving for Black colleges and other causes is also on the rise. In early June, the Financial Times reported that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other large corporations had recently pledged at least $458 million to support progress toward racial equity, including support for higher education. All told, Apple has said it donated $100 million or more to assorted racial equity initiatives.
4. Black philanthropists are leading the way
Donors from all backgrounds have turned their attention to increasing calls for racial equity. While new donors are turning their giving to racial equity issues, wealthy African Americans have contributed to causes that support racial justice and equity.
In recent years, we have continued to see affluent Black people, such as the entertainer and fashion icon Rihanna and basketball great Michael Jordan, make significant philanthropic commitments.
Along with other colleagues at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and in partnership with the Bank of America, we are conducting a long-term research project regarding affluent donors. Based on our findings in our 2018 report, at least half of all wealthy Black donors supported African American causes, compared to 6.5% overall of all surveyed donors.
Additionally, 43.8% of the wealthy Black donors surveyed indicated that they made giving to groups that aim to improve race relations a high priority, as opposed to an average of 5.7% all donors.
In mid-September, philanthropist Susan Sandler announced that she was giving a total of $200 million to an array of racial justice groups. Sandler’s disclosure echoed Scott’s announcement, in July 2020, that she was giving $587 million to HBCUs and racial justice organizations.
That means established civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, and newer racial justice groups like the Equal Justice Initiative, which aims to end mass incarceration and advance racial equity, and the Center for Policing Equity, a think tank focused on improving racial equity within police departments, are all getting a boost.
Kim Williams-Pulfer, Postdoctoral Research Appointee-Mays Family Institute on Diverse Philanthropy, IUPUI and Una Osili, Professor, Economics and Philanthropic Studies; Associate Dean for Research and International Programs, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, IUPUI
We are seeing an outpouring of donations from individuals, corporations and foundations that began to grow as soon as protests and other activities in support of racial and social justice started to spread across the country.
Floyd’s GoFundMe memorial campaign has garnered more donations than any other campaign in the online platform’s history, raising over $14 million with 500,000 individual donors from 140 countries worldwide. Many of these gifts to the impacted families of police violence were for $5 and few were for $50,000 or more.
2. Direct support for grassroots organizations
After Memorial Day weekend, when Floyd died while in custody of the Minneapolis police, many Black-led grassroots organizations began to draw much higher levels of support as the protests garnered more participation and attention.
For example, when protests erupted, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which advocates for a more equitable system of cash bail, turned its attention to bailing out arrested protesters. Once the fund reached a total of $20 million in donations, its organizers urged donors to support Black-led organizations.
Other grassroots organizations and networks also received support, such as the National Bail Fund Network, which received $80 million in donations in late spring.
Even before the protests erupted, the Movement for Black Lives had received $5 million in the first five months of 2020 to support Black communities affected by the pandemic and to address broader issues of racial equity. This was nearly double the $2.7 million the group, founded in 2014 following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, raised in all of 2019, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
The Libra Foundation announced that a dozen grant-making organizations were joining together to give a total of $36 million to Black-led organizations and social movements like The Black Youth Project and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance.
These numbers provide only a partial estimate of total giving to these causes, and it will take at least until mid-2021 for the IRS to begin to release the official records and statistics needed for a fuller picture of giving to these groups. Based on data from Candid, a research group, institutional funders and large donors have contributed $5.9 billion for organizations primarily engaged in in racial equity work to date.
3. Shoring up HBCUs
Historically Black colleges and universities, often called HBCUs, and related groups that fund scholarships for the students who attend them, are getting more donations in 2020.
All told, the roughly 100 HBCUs have a total of only $2 billion in their endowments. By comparison, 54 predominantly white colleges and universities have $2 billion or more in their own endowment.
In 2018, for example, there were seven of these major gifts totaling $48 million. In contrast, there were at least 33 of these donations by mid-September of 2020, totaling $347 million, according a list of these donations of $1 million or more compiled by The Chronicle of Philanthropy and tracking by statistician Xiao Han of additional news reports and public information disclosed by donors and the schools.
Corporate giving for Black colleges and other causes is also on the rise. In early June, the Financial Times reported that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other large corporations had recently pledged at least $458 million to support progress toward racial equity, including support for higher education. All told, Apple has said it donated $100 million or more to assorted racial equity initiatives.
4. Black philanthropists are leading the way
Donors from all backgrounds have turned their attention to increasing calls for racial equity. While new donors are turning their giving to racial equity issues, wealthy African Americans have contributed to causes that support racial justice and equity.
In recent years, we have continued to see affluent Black people, such as the entertainer and fashion icon Rihanna and basketball great Michael Jordan, make significant philanthropic commitments.
Along with other colleagues at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and in partnership with the Bank of America, we are conducting a long-term research project regarding affluent donors. Based on our findings in our 2018 report, at least half of all wealthy Black donors supported African American causes, compared to 6.5% overall of all surveyed donors.
Additionally, 43.8% of the wealthy Black donors surveyed indicated that they made giving to groups that aim to improve race relations a high priority, as opposed to an average of 5.7% all donors.
In mid-September, philanthropist Susan Sandler announced that she was giving a total of $200 million to an array of racial justice groups. Sandler’s disclosure echoed Scott’s announcement, in July 2020, that she was giving $587 million to HBCUs and racial justice organizations.
That means established civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League, and newer racial justice groups like the Equal Justice Initiative, which aims to end mass incarceration and advance racial equity, and the Center for Policing Equity, a think tank focused on improving racial equity within police departments, are all getting a boost.
Kim Williams-Pulfer, Postdoctoral Research Appointee-Mays Family Institute on Diverse Philanthropy, IUPUI and Una Osili, Professor, Economics and Philanthropic Studies; Associate Dean for Research and International Programs, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, IUPUI
This article originally appeared on ProPublica.org, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
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In Florida, the Gutting of a Landmark Law Leaves Few Felons Likely to Vote
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DOJ Frees Federal Prosecutors to Take Steps That Could Interfere With Elections, Weakening Long-standing Policy
In an internal announcement, the Justice Department created an exception to a decadeslong policy meant to prevent prosecutors from taking overt investigative steps that might affect the outcome of the vote. Read the story.
The Justice Department May Have Violated Attorney General Barr’s Own Policy Memo
In a memo from May, the attorney general reminded Justice Dept. prosecutors to avoid partisan politics. Then a U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania announced an election investigation that had partisan overtones. Read the story.
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Everything you need to know about local election deadlines, what the pandemic has changed and casting your ballot so it counts. Read the story.
Vote by Mail News
The Postal Service is reporting some of its worst mail delays since operations bogged down in July and August, according to internal documents filed in federal court. The on-time delivery of first-class mail ― which includes absentee ballots and other election materials ― fell 4.5% over a two-week period this fall, but deliveries of magazines and marketing mail were not affected. USPS hasn’t explained the disparity. (CNN)
Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an order that will limit drop-off locations for absentee ballots to just one per county. Partisan poll watchers will also be allowed to monitor those sites, Abbott said, in an effort to “ensure greater transparency.” (Texas Tribune)
After losing a court appeal, Ohio’s secretary of state said counties can now each install more than one ballot drop box, but the new boxes can only be placed at county election headquarters. (Cincinnati Enquirer)
A Rochester, N.Y. printing company defended its political leanings and blamed a computer glitch for misprinting ballot return envelopes for thousands of voters in Brooklyn and Long Island. (Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, The City)
North Carolina’s Board of Elections is telling voters to ignore more than 11,000 ballot applications that were pre-filled with incorrect information and mailed out by a third-party vendor. (WBTV)
Thousands of voters in Gwinnett County, Ga., are waiting longer than usual for their absentee ballots after the county enlarged its envelopes as part of a court settlement. The envelopes now feature larger font and clearer instructions, but take extra time to process. (Atlanta Journal Constitution)
The head of elections in Volusia County, Fla., said it’s perfectly legal to seal ballot envelopes with tape, after some first-time mail voters struggled with the adhesive strip. (Daytona Beach News-Journal)
But the town clerk in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, warned that taped envelopes could be flagged as suspicious or fraudulent. A state elections spokesman clarified that usually applies to ballots that have clearly been reopened, then taped shut. (Herald-Independent)
Michigan election officials will be allowed to start prepping ballots on the morning of Nov. 2, ahead of the official count on Election Day. (WNDU)
Voters in the remote community of Torrey, Utah are trying to figure out how to cast ballots in the state’s mail-in election after their only post office shut down. (The Spectrum)
More than 25 states use “signature matching” in an effort to verify ballots against existing registration files and prevent fraud. But even when multiple judges or software programs are deployed, the results can vary widely. One elections expert said consistency is key. (The New York Times)
Election Website Issues
Pennsylvania’s voting website crashed for more than 40 hours this weekend. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
One third of county election websites in Kansas and Missouri are not secure, according to an analysis by The Beacon. (The Beacon)
Technology failures with Florida’s online voter registration tool has frustrated people trying to register to vote. The website crashed on the last day to register for the Nov. 3 election. State officials blamed a misconfigured computer server for the glitch. (Miami Herald, AP)
Florida officials responded by extending the registration deadline by one day, while an advocacy group filed a lawsuit to buy voters more time. (WMFE, Tallahassee Democrat)
In-Person Voting
On Monday, Detroit opened 23 satellite centers for early voting, plus seven absentee ballot drop boxes, after problems with its August primary. (WZXY)
As the GOP prepares to field 50,000 carefully trained election volunteers, the president’s rhetoric continues to raise concerns over voter intimidation. The Republican effort will reportedly station monitors at traditional polling places alongside early voting sites and ballot drop boxes. (The New York Times, Reuters)
Election administrators, law enforcement and federal officials are increasingly concerned about the possibility of disruptions, or even violence, on Election Day. (The New York Times, The Washington Post)
Georgetown Law created fact sheets on each state’s laws about private militia groups and what to do if they are at a polling place or registration drive. The Giffords Law Center has published a state-by-state guide to the laws around voter intimidation and having firearms at the polls (Georgetown Law, Giffords Law Center)
Iowa unveiled an updated voter registration form which reflects an August executive order that restored voting rights for thousands of felons in the state. (Des Moines Register)
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, libraries are serving as early voting sites, hosting ballot drop boxes and providing a place for voters to get help registering, requesting an absentee ballot and more. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
At least 33 states are asking voters to wear masks at the polls this year and are contending with how to respond when voters refuse. (ABC News)
For voters who decline to wear a mask inside their polling place, Connecticut plans to provide a curbside option. (The Middletown Press)
The Broward County, Florida, commission is urging its election supervisor to separate maskless voters. (Sun Sentinel)
The Latest on Misinformation
Unfounded comments by President Donald Trump about corruption at the polls in Philadelphia prompted city officials to prepare for possible voter intimidation on Election Day. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Nearly every claim about mail-in voting made by Trump during the first presidential debate was partially or completely inaccurate, according to a fact check by CNN. (CNN)
False beliefs about election fraud are largely fueled by political elites and conservative-leaning mass media outlets repeating Trump’s claims, without framing it as disinformation, according to a new working paper. (Berkman Klein Center)
Michigan’s secretary of state asked the state’s attorney general to investigate a GOP press release making allegations about an unlocked ballot drop box, claiming the party is spreading misinformation. (Detroit News)
Alabama’s secretary of state told voters to ignore voting mailers from a third party group in Texas telling them that they’re not registered to vote. (AL.com)
Officials from Pope County, Arkansas warned voters to beware of a phone scam asking people for their social security number in order to receive a vote-by-mail ballot. (Arkansas Democrat Gazette)
Two conservative operatives were charged with felonies for robocalls aimed at dissuading Detroit residents in majority-Black areas from voting by mail. (Associated Press)
