Boston Globe: “Hundreds of thousands of new voters could join the state’s rolls in the coming years after Gov. Charlie Baker (R) signed legislation that adopts automatic voter registration — one in a flurry of bills that became law Thursday with a few flicks of the Republican’s pen.”

“The voting measure, which registers eligible residents when they get their driver’s licenses or health insurance through the state, was one of more than 50 pieces of legislation Baker signed that touch on everything from the state’s opioid crisis and animal abuse to climate change and renewable energy.”

“The most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.”

— Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D), quoted by the Washington Post, on President Trump’s “voter fraud” panel.

“Georgia election officials got a friendly warning in August 2016 that their electronic voting system could be easily breached. But less than a month before the November election, a state cybersecurity official fretted that ‘critical vulnerabilities’ persisted,” internal emails obtained by McClatchy show.

“The emails… offer a glimpse into a Georgia election security team that appeared to be outmatched even as evidence grew that Russian operatives were seeking to penetrate state and county election systems across the country.”

In an attempt to defend voter ID laws, President Trump “wrongly claimed that shoppers need to show photo identification to buy groceries,” the AP reports.

Said Trump: “If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID. You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.”

“President Trump chaired a meeting Friday of his most senior national security advisers to discuss the administration’s effort to safeguard November’s elections from Russian interference, the first such meeting he’s led on the matter, but issued no new directives to counter or deter the threat,” the Washington Post reports.

“The meeting, which lasted less than an hour, covered all the activities by federal agencies to help state and local election officials, and to investigate and hold accountable Russian hackers seeking to undermine American democracy.”

“Nineteen months into his presidency, there is no coherent Trump administration strategy to combat foreign election interference — and no single person or agency in charge,” NBC News reports.

“After terrorists struck on 9/11, the U.S. government passed laws, boosted funding, and reorganized itself with the goal of making sure such an attack could never happen again. But no such wholesale changes have taken place in the nearly two years since Russia sought to manipulate the 2016 election, cyber aggression that some lawmakers have called an act of war.”

“Nine states with a history of racial discrimination are more aggressively removing registered voters from their rolls than other states, according to a report released Friday,” NBC News reports.

“After reviewing voter purges nationally from 2012 to 2016, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found that the mostly Southern jurisdictions that had once been required to get changes to voting policies pre-approved by the Justice Department had higher rates of purging than jurisdictions that were not previously subject to pre-clearance.”

A new Center for Politics/Ipsos poll finds 51% of Americans believe elections are fair and open, and large majorities of Americans express skepticism about big money in politics and favor disclosure of donations.

The nation’s top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) that the company “installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them,” Motherboard reports.

“Election-management systems are not the voting terminals that voters use to cast their ballots, but are just as critical: they sit in county election offices and contain software that in some counties is used to program all the voting machines used in the county; the systems also tabulate final results aggregated from voting machines.”