Each of the 9,000 election jurisdictions in the United States has its own way of running and maintaining elections. Nearly every one uses computerized voting systems, many of which do not provide readable paper backups, meaning there’s no way to confirm they haven’t been hacked. “We’ve decided in this country that private vendors will play a central role in running our elections and counting our votes,” Lawrence Norden tells the New Yorker. “Private equity owning these companies means the public doesn’t have a critical piece of information about our elections.” // New Yorker

New York City and its surrounding urban areas are severely lagging in census responses. Wealthy neighborhoods with a history of high response rates such as the Upper East Side and SoHo have especially low response rates this year, likely because residents have temporarily left the city due to Covid-19. Thomas Wolf looks at these numbers and describes why, especially now, an accurate census count is so important. // Read More

This morning, the U.S. government executed Daniel Lewis Lee, the first use of the federal death penalty in 17 years. With more executions planned, a grim reality check is in order. There’s simply no good reason the long-dormant “machinery of death” needed to be activated now. “The government had the moral burden here, if not the legal one, to justify why the middle of an out-of-control deadly pandemic is the right time to be killing in the name of the people,” writes Brennan Center Fellow Andrew Cohen. // Read More

The headlines went wobbly when President Trump commuted Roger Stone’s prison sentence on Friday. He wasn’t Trump’s “ally” or “friend” — he was a self-declared go-between with Wikileaks, and thus with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. When Trump acted, the White House’s statement noted that Stone “would be put at serious medical risk in prison.” But what about the medical risk that thousands of other federal prisoners face? That concern about the coronavirus doesn’t seem to apply to their health, says Lauren-Brooke Eisen. // Washington Post

Recent efforts to keep tabs on Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations against family separation echo the infamous FBI program used to spy on civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. And today’s surveillance analysts have a new source of information: social media. In recent years, social media posts have landed people of color in overbroad and unreliable gang databases, and posts have even been used to justify keeping individuals imprisoned. For the Brookings Institution, Rachel Levinson-Waldman and Ángel Díaz write about the civil liberties and civil rights concerns that are currently going unaddressed. // Brookings

Brennan Center Fellow Michael German testified before the Oregon Legislative Assembly last week about the infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacists and far-right militias. While this only describes a tiny percentage of law enforcement officials, the public safety harms that police officers affiliated with violent white supremacist and far-right militant groups pose cannot be overstated. Governments have not responded appropriately to address this problem. // Read More

• Lauren-Brooke Eisen on police reform // ABC News
• Martha Kinsella and Daniel Weiner on the Supreme Court’s ruling in that the president can fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau // Just Security
• Myrna Pérez on the coronavirus’s effect on the election // Pew Trusts
• Michael Waldman on making the 2020 election safe and secure // Solvable podcast
• Wendy Weiser on the need for more federal funding for elections // AP