‌‌‌‌Election Day 2021 Is Here. But Who’s Counting?

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Tomorrow is Election Day 2021, though elections offices around the country have been accepting mail-in and early votes for weeks now. I noted one under-the-radar voting story here last week: Election workers, wary of last year’s threats and harassment, are calling it quits. More on that below.

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Alright, let’s dig in.

Election Day 2021 Is Approaching (And It’s Already Here)

Around the country, Americans are voting: For school boards, mayors, members of Congress, and governors in NEW JERSEY and VIRGINIA. 
 

But millions have already voted. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), for instance, signed a new law this year establishing nine days of early voting, which took place from Oct. 23 through the end of the month. 
 

And last year, Virginia’s legislature changed the early voting schedule from one week to six, and voters no longer need an excuse to vote early.

More than 859,000 voters have voted early so far, and 284,000 more have voted by mail, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. 
 

Those numbers have led to some anxiety, particularly around early voting: The Democratic Party sued two local USPS officials for the alleged failure to collect ballots at Post Offices and get them to voters. But the USPS said this is all one big misunderstanding: just because ballots aren’t “scanned” by the USPS doesn’t mean they’re missing: Sometimes, in order to expedite mail, the USPS skips the scanning procedure and its local processing plants and sends the mail straight to local post offices. In fact, USPS said, “all known mail-in ballots in its possession are being expeditiously processed and delivered.”

A district judge signed off on an agreement between the parties Thursday: The USPS will essentially continue to follow its normal election mail procedures, expediting ballots through the system and making sure USPS facilities are cleared of election mail every day. And they’ll give the Democrats a daily progress report.

Some Election Workers Are Calling It Quits 

I reported this week on a troubling trend: Full-time election workers, and seasonal election staff, are feeling the impact of the past year’s harassment campaign, championed by Donald Trump in his effort to sow doubt about the democratic process.
 

Across the country, officials are noting “an unusually large number of retirements,” as KENTUCKY Secretary of State Michael G. Adams (R) said of the departure rate of county clerks in his commonwealth.

“That’s a double-edged problem,” legal scholar and law professor Rick Hasen told me. “On the one hand, you’re losing the competent people, on the other hand, you’re potentially bringing in more people who are not committed to the fairness of the process, but have an allegiance to a particular candidate.”

Around The States

Another thing about these 2021 elections: More cities than ever are using RANKED-CHOICE VOTING. 
 

A majority of all voters — and subsets of Democrats, Republicans and independents — support reforming the ELECTORAL COUNT ACT and making it harder for members of Congress to reject states’ Electoral College votes, one poll found. 
 

In the wake of 2020, VIRGINIA is seeing an influx of poll watchers. “I’m running out of Republican badges,” one supervisor said. 
 

We covered the first suit against TEXAS’ redistricting rules, and now there’s another, this time with the support of former Attorney General Eric Holder.
 

New proposed congressional districts in GEORGIA could pit two Democrats against each other. 

Berks County, PENNSYLVANIA included the wrong ballot deadline in its Spanish-language ballot instructions to voters. Activists have called on the county to honor votes cast on the wrong date, listed as Nov. 18 rather than Nov. 2 on the mailers. Berks County includes Reading, a city of nearly 90,000 people that’s 67% Latino. 
 

One day after ILLINOIS Democrats approved a redistricting map putting Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) in the same district as Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL), Kinzinger announced his retirement. 

Finally, three University of FLORIDA professors were prohibited by the university from participating as expert witnesses in a lawsuit against a new restrictive voting law in the state. 

Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) has tee'd up a Wednesday vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

The Latest In Audit Mania

A piece of election equipment in Adams Township, MICHIGAN has gone missing, shortly after the state stepped in to prevent the QAnon-promoting clerk there from running elections. We’re hearing echoes of Mesa County, Colorado.
 

WISCONSIN’s Legislative Audit Bureau — the body pursuing one of three reviews of the 2020 election in that state, and the most credible of the three — found nothing amiss in the last election’s results. You know what that means: More investigation. 
 

VIRGINIA’s attorney general has had enough, demanding that the Trumpy State Sen. Amanda Chase hand over this supposed evidence of Democratic cheating she’s spoken about so often recently. 

A potential legal dispute brews between ARIZONA Senate Republicans and the firm they hired to conduct the politicized “audit," Cyber Ninjas.

WaPo: Virginia’s redistricting commission’s failure to transcend partisanship has lessons for other states, critics say
 

'CNN: It's absolutely getting worse': Secretaries of state targeted by Trump election lies live in fear for their safety and are desperate for protection
 

Open Secrets: Details of the money behind Jan. 6 protests continue to emerge

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