By Jennifer Cohn
March 16, 2021
In 2002, Alabama’s democratic governor, Don Siegelman ran for reelection against Republican Bob Riley. Siegelman had previously served as attorney general, secretary of state, lieutenant governor, and governor. He was the only person to have held all four of these offices in Alabama. As reported by the New York Times, Siegelman was “a major frustration to Alabama Republicans. The state [was] bright red, but Mr. Siegelman managed to win the governorship in 1998 with 57 percent of the vote.” He was the one Democrat that Alabama Republicans “could never get rid of.”
By Jennifer Cohn
March 5, 2021
On March 28, 2016, soon after Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination, the Trump campaign announced that it had hired a political operative named Paul Manafort to assist with the campaign.
Before joining the Trump campaign, Manafort had for years worked for a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, one of Putin’s closest allies.
In 1994, Rove consulted for Republican Perry O. Hooper in his race for Alabama chief justice. Hooper lost by 304 votes, but Rove immediately sought a statewide recount. According to a former Rove staffer, a key part of the recount strategy formulated by Rove was to “‘undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral — all of that.’” (Emphasis added.) According to the Atlantic, “[t]hree days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, ‘We have endured lies in this campaign, but…
In September 2020, a Texas examiner’s report said there was a “ bug” in ES&S’s hash verification script. What happened after is unknown.
By Jennifer Cohn
12/21/20
First, a cautionary note. Close partisan associations and corruption involving voting machine vendors are inappropriate, and significant discrepancies between polling and official outcomes are unnerving and fair game for reporting, as are voting-system vulnerabilities and the many electronic “glitches” that occur in elections. But they do not prove fraud. Moreover, we cannot typically prove that election outcomes are wrong without conducting robust manual audits using hand marked paper ballots (with an exception for…
By Jonathan Simon
As Donald Trump — facing a defeat he signaled in advance he would not (and could not, given the stakes and his nature) accept — files lawsuit after lawsuit in a kind of virtuoso false-note cadenza improvised on a lifelong theme of litigiousness, some of my election integrity colleagues (and good friends) have declared support for Trump’s attempted putsch, “open-mindedly” asserting it is our vehicle to a new election-integrity dawn. The ironies could not be much richer.
We do face what one of my colleagues, appalled by Trump, described as a “horrible dilemma:” to seize the rarest…
By Jennifer Cohn, @JennyCohn1 8/3/2020
July 16, 2020
Dear Mr. James:
We are advocates for the protection of U.S. elections from all forms of anti-democratic interference and fraud, whether by the suppression of voters or by the manipulation of votes that have been cast.
We are excited to hear about your new organization, More Than A Vote. We welcome you to this fight and applaud your new initiative to protect the voting rights of voters of color from attacks born of institutional racism and a fierce, cynical, win-by-any-means electoral politics. We have developed a plan and a strategy that will exactly complement what you are…
By Jennifer Cohn
@jennycohn1 #ProtectOurVotes
Updated October 9, 2018
Note: I originally published this piece before the 2018 midterm elections. I decided to re-publish it because I can’t get the title to show on the original and the tips are applicable to future elections as well.
Several people have asked me for something relatively short that they can cut and paste into an email or letter to send to election-security decision-makers. This is my first attempt. Feel free to cut and paste it into an email if you like it. If it’s still too long, feel free to cut it down as you see fit. Thanks.
______________________________________________________
Dear ______:
The election-security situation in the U.S. is much worse than most people realize, calling for much greater scrutiny of the vendors themselves and of proposed “fixes” to the system.
Control over America’s electronic voting system is dangerously…
Attorney and Election Integrity Advocate #ProtectOurVotes #PaperBallotsNow @jennycohn1