By Jennifer Cohn
4/28/21

In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives, tried to unseat Ted Cruz, a Republican member of the U.S. Senate.

The race between O’Rourke and Cruz received significant media attention and was the most expensive U.S. Senate election in history up to that point.

O’Rourke, a Texas native and Columbia University graduate, had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012.

When he decided to shift gears and run for the U.S. …

By Jennifer Cohn, 4/27/21

During the 2018 midterm election in Florida, the incumbent in the U.S. senate race was Democratic Senator Bill Nelson. His opponent was then Governor Rick Scott (R ).

Before entering politics, Nelson had served as a captain in the Army Reserve during the Vietnam War where he saw active duty. He graduated from Yale University and the University of Virginia law school.

He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972.

In January 1986, he had become the second sitting member of Congress to fly in space when he served as a payload specialist…

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

1. If you decide to vote by mail, apply ASAP and, if allowed in your county (check), return your ballot in person at a drop box or office, not via the Post Office, which is suffering delays due to the pandemic and Trump’s effort to destroy it. Sign the envelope & follow the instructions exactly.