“This is all for you,” she said. “You’re the ones who came to me and said ‘Something is not right, will you please check into it.'”

The remarks were her first public appearance in the county in over a month. Peters, who is under local, state, and federal investigation for allegedly enabling an election security breach, had disappeared after speaking at a pro-Trump 2020 conspiracy event hosted by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell on August 10, claiming she feared for her safety.

At the church, she complained her search for answers about the 2020 vote had been met with resistance from “powerful people” who “don’t want us to look at the facts,” and who were now trying to remove her “just for doing my job.” The Republican-elected official ended her remarks with a plea for donations.

Peters has become a “minor celebrity,” as a recent Washington Post article put it, in the world of Trump-fans working to sustain the big lie that he won the 2020 election. But Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and the Republican head of the state’s county clerks’ association says Peters’s efforts to prove that the election was not secure have not only damaged trust in elections, but themselves facilitated a serious breach of election security protocols. As a result, Griswold decertified 41 Mesa county machines, which will have to be replaced. Griswold, a Democrat, has filed a lawsuit to suspend Peters and her deputy from overseeing elections.

The tumult in this western Colorado county portends a growing post-2020 issue, as local elected officials with responsibility for overseeing elections are increasingly undermining faith in elections, pushing false claims, and even breaching security protocols. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump and a leading proponent of his big lie, has encouraged like-minded people to take over key, hyper-local, election administration roles. There are thousands of these positions nationwide—ranging from town or county clerks to the boards that certify elections—where dedicated conspiracists could wreak havoc. At a higher level, Trump has endorsed secretary of state candidates in multiple states for the 2022 elections who back his election lies. According to a Reuters analysis, nearly a dozen Republican contenders for these chief election administrator positions in five battleground states openly question the validity of the 2020 election. “It is incredibly dangerous to support people for office who do not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election,” Rick Hasen, a voting-rights expert and professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, told CNN. “It suggests that they might be willing to bend or break the rules when it comes to running elections and counting votes in the future.”

Griswold, who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told Mother Jones that next year’s elections give voters a critical chance to control who runs balloting. “I believe that this insider threat will spread into 2022,” she warns. “It’s very concerning to have to worry that people who are in places of trust to oversee elections may not believe in the right to vote or in democracy.”

The investigations targeting Peters, along with deputy clerk Belinda Knisley, surround evidence that they allowed a non-county employee to make a copy of Dominion voting machine software before a routine update in late May 2021. State officials say Peters and Knisley lied to get the person on-site access and ordered surveillance cameras be turned off while they were there. Copies of the hard drive, and of a video that was surreptitiously taken anyway during the software update, were then posted online by conservative election conspiracy theorists seeking to bolster false notions that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump with the use of rigged voting equipment from Dominion, one of the country’s major election vendors. 

In August, the county commissioners hired a former Republican Secretary of State, Wayne Williams, to temporarily run elections. In a court filing contesting Griswold’s ongoing attempt to strip Peters of her duties, an attorney representing Peters admitted she arranged the access and had the cameras turned off, but argued she had acted to “prevent fraud and corruption in elections.” Peters did not respond to requests for comment.

Files purported to have been from the hard drive were analyzed on stage as part of Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium,” an event where he promised to present evidence that Chinese hackers, in cahoots with Dominion, had stolen the election. While Peters spoke at the event, she denied providing the files, claiming that if they had come from her office, they must have been taken during a “raid.”

Shortly after the breach was exposed, Matt Crane, a former Republican county clerk and executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, told reporters that Peters had committed a “solo, intentional, and selfish act that jeopardizes the conduct and integrity of elections in Mesa County, and affects the confidence of voters throughout the state and the nation.”

Mike Beasley, a lobbyist representing the association, told Mother Jones that a community’s trust can be shattered when a clerk violates their oath, “and that’s, in our view, very strongly what happened here.” Clerks perform many duties, he says, and the public relies on them to safeguard data.

The way to head off such situations, he added, is continued transparency and public outreach about how elections work, what the procedures are—things as basic as inviting the public to volunteer as election workers.

“We just have to keep doing that,” he said. But for every person, Beasley says, who is “driven by their hatred for the government and the suspicion around it, there are 20 people who don’t believe that. Facts will win the day. Our actions will win the day, and the hearts and minds. I’m old and I’m a nerd, but I do believe that.”

There’s evidence Colorado may be home to other local election officials in cahoots with people who deny Trump’s loss. The Colorado Times Recorder, a progressive news site, recently reported on a January 22, 2021 email that surfaced in a lawsuit filed by a Dominion employee against Trump, his attorney Sidney Powell, and Joe Oltmann, a Colorado-based election conspiracist. Long before Peters breached security protocols in service of the big lie, Oltmann wrote Powell to claim that “several county clerks” were cooperating with him in the state. He later told the Times Recorder Peters wasn’t one of them—but boasted that “there is so much more to come out.”

Top image credit: Mother Jones illustration; Getty; Chip Somodevilla/Getty; McKenzie Lange/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP

As first reported Monday by journalist Steven Monacelli, the hacker claims that “a decade’s worth of data from the company” has been obtained, including all domain purchases, domain transfers, and unredacted website registration data that could shed light on individuals and groups behind extremist or hate sites.

“This dataset is all that’s needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the Internet that has eluded researchers, activists, and, well, just about everybody,” the hacker boasted in announcing the attack.

The company has called itself the “Swiss Bank of Domains,” with company CEO Rob Monster joking earlier this year to NPR that he’s “the Lex Luthor of the internet.” In that story, Monster likened white supremacist leaders to “shock jocks,” and claimed that while he does not personally think such content needed “to be available to people on the internet” publishing it remained “the decision of our client organizations.” Epik’s clients include Gab, the social networking platform where a user boasted about targeting a Pittsburgh synagogue just before carrying out his deadly assault, and Parler, whose links to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol got it booted by major tech providers. 

Emma Best, a key figure with DDoS Secrets, a web archive with a public interest mission of hosting hacked and leaked data, tweeted Tuesday morning that the site was working to obtain the materials and share them with researchers and journalists. The group says it is preparing 180 gigabytes of data from “Epik, known for hosing fascist, white supremacist and other right-wing content.” In a separate tweet, Best noted the group’s history with the hacked-domain registrar, noting that Epik’s services “were used to defame, stalk, and threaten #DDoSSecrets” members after the site hosted data obtained from Gab. “Epik knew. Gab’s CEO knew. They all enabled it,” Best wrote.

While a spokesperson for the company did not respond to a Mother Jones request for comment Tuesday afternoon, Gizmodo reported that a company spokesperson claimed Epik had mounted an investigation but was “not aware of any breach.” 

Monday’s release announcing the hack called for support for “#OperationJane,” an online pro-abortion rights campaign that promotes flooding websites and tip lines with fake reports after Texas enacted an anti-abortion rights law soliciting citizens to identify anyone participating in or encouraging the procedure. An Epik subsidiary briefly provided support to a prominent tip site related to the new law, but cut virtually all services, with the company telling reporters such a site violated its terms of service.

It was one of the first things he said to me. The team’s general manager told me, the social media manager, that I couldn’t speak to players—because I might sleep with them. How do you successfully leverage social media without access to the one thing people care about in sports? It was a trip. I couldn’t believe it even came out of his mouth. I honestly should have known then exactly what it’d be like working there.

Fortunately, the PR director knew it was ridiculous and said I could do whatever I needed to. Still, they preferred that I stay out of the clubhouse. The PR intern (male) had full access. But me (female manager) had to stalk players going from the clubhouse to batting practice. Eventually, I was able to build my own professional rapport with the team.

But the whole environment was toxic. I think it’s well documented that MiLB is a cesspool. Just less so for office workers. I felt that in order to “make it,” you had to forfeit your personal life and goals for the “glamour” of working in sports.

I was blamed for the wifi being out. It fell under the purview of someone else, but I was still screamed at by two grown men. The hours were batshit bonkers. I had to beg for a night off to go to my aunt’s wedding. The GM asked if I could skip the reception and come back to work. I missed my cousin’s college graduation because I had to choose between that or the wedding since it was back-to-back nights.

Of course, we were paid pennies, too. The pay structure was based on commission from ticket sales. Doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know group tickets and corporate sponsorship sales did all right. I was in charge of social media and the merchandise store, then was given $2 Tuesday ticket packages to sell. So, no time to sell, and something with a small return to sell. Then, I was reamed for not pushing tickets.

Goes without saying that every word out the general manager’s mouth was a lie or lip service. He was the ultimate chameleon. Whatever situation he was in, he’d adapt to try to appear that he was better than he was. If he was around owners, he was a polite kiss-ass with “business savvy.” If he was around MLB players on rehab or other teams’ top prospects, he’d pretend to know every finite detail about them and their careers. He’d want to talk shop and try to give them tips as if they needed or wanted it. If he was around families at the ballpark, he’d portray himself as the quintessential family man. It was embarrassing.

When I left, I needed a few months to “get back to myself.” My family told me I had started morphing into a negative-focused person because of my job. There were some good apples in the bunch, but the toxicity of the bad ones was unparalleled. I think when you’re immersed in a hostile environment, your defense mechanism is to adopt the characteristics of the ones attacking you. You see it in work environments, families, marriages—people harden themselves and become harsh to keep from being hurt. It took some time for me to start thinking and behaving like my old self. In hindsight, I had become quick to anger, made snide comments for no reason—about anything and everything, really. I was being swallowed by selfishness.

I quit without notice early in the season. But who wouldn’t? I was 105 pounds, from the stress.

I packed up my office in the middle of a doubleheader. When it was over, I went into the general manager’s office and gave him my keys. I told him I was quitting and wouldn’t be back. He asked me if I was going to be there for the rest of the homestand. I reiterated I was walking out the doors and never coming back. He was watching the radar to see if it’d rain that night and was having the staff gather to pull tarp over the field. His final response was, “Well, I guess you’re not pulling tarp?” I said no. Then he said, “Yeah, I guess that would be anticlimactic.” I just left after that. It was like talking to a brick wall at that point.

This story is part of our Bad Bosses project, a reported collection of accounts from workers about their terrible bosses and the system that creates them. You can read more about the entire project and find every story here. Annotations—highlighted throughout—can be clicked for further context and comment from other parties. Got your own bad boss story? Send us an email.

When the pandemic hit, thousands of Hilton workers were furloughed. Here are two of their stories.

Brenda Holland, a room attendant at a DoubleTree by Hilton

In March 2020 we were laid off due to COVID-19. We were home for about 15 months. I couldn’t take a new job because I have a 9-year-old son, so I was homeschooling him during that time. We just got back to work at the hotel.

My doctor prescribed Naproxen maybe a week or two after going back to work, because the work that I’m doing now, I’ve never done before. I have never worked so much in my life where my whole body aches and I have to actually be on medication. When I’d told her about it, she prescribed something stronger—because I was just doing Advil—so now I take Naproxen in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening.

I don’t really see any sympathy from the managers. I’m not gonna lie. I’ve seen more trying to micromanage us, making sure clean rooms that are usually gonna take an hour are done within 30 minutes so that the turnover is faster, and we’re getting guests in there as quickly as possible. I don’t see a lot of sympathy. They can pretend all they want but we can see right through them because I know that all they’re trying to do is make money. I guess I understand because they’re also just taking orders from someone.

It comes from the top, right? The CEO of Hilton, Chris. And then it trickles down to our local managers. He has the power to change all of this. I think he’s more concerned about making more money—as though $55 million is not enough. That’s how much he made last year. And I didn’t know where I was gonna get money to pay my rent or feed my son. I lost my benefits. I couldn’t afford my husband’s medication that’s $1,000 if we’re not insured.

But this is the man who’s making $55 million a year and is also trying to take work away from us, the little people, people who need it the most.

We definitely have told the local general manager but I don’t see a lot of care or empathy for us, the people doing the backbreaking work, so we feel like everything we’re talking about is falling on deaf ears. And because he probably doesn’t have much of a say. He’s also taking orders. He can’t tell us much unless he gets it from the top.

All they say is that we’re understaffed, which we are. A lot of people have quit because of backbreaking work. Nobody wants to work anymore. I know you’ve heard about this supposed labor shortage but it’s not because we don’t want to come back to work. It’s because of the extra workload that we have to go through now. It’s ridiculous. 

The way it works is we have stayovers and checkouts, half and half. A stayover, you can just remake the bed, touch up the bathroom, and take out the garbage, and you know you’re out within 15 minutes. It saves time and it’s not so heavy on your body. You’re basically retouching that room every day, preparing it for checkout in the next two or three days so it’s not as difficult when you clean at checkout.

But if you’re cleaning a room at checkout that hasn’t been cleaned for five days—imagine a family of four staying there, the garbage alone. I’ve been taking out three or four bags of garbage every day from one room. You have to make both beds. The bathroom is disgusting. And we’re using more chemicals that are toxic to us to get the bathtub nice and clean. 

When staffing is proper, it’s about 15 rooms per day, split between stayovers and checkouts, so it balances out. It’s not as bad. Sometimes we have business travelers, who are usually there for a day, so that’s not bad, and their rooms are not dirty.

I’m cleaning 17 rooms a day now. It’s crazy. I am laughing to keep from crying.

I lay in bed all day when I’m not working. My son turns 10 next week. He wants to spend time with me, but I’m too tired because of the workload. I can’t even cook for my family. That’s what we’re going through right now as room attendants. And that’s why there is a shortage of workers—because of the changes. It’s a lot.

Honestly, I didn’t want to stay because it is a lot for me. But I’m also a mother, a wife. I have a family. I can’t just leave the job without a plan. It provides for my son and my family. Especially health care—it’s very important to me, having insurance, that safety net. I’m going back to school in September, so maybe I’ll try something completely different. 

I just want hotel customers, when they stay at the Hilton or any other hotel for that matter, to request daily room cleaning because that helps us with the workload. And that also helps us make our hours. Right now, we’re seeing a lot of hours, but it’s also summertime. I don’t know what’s going to happen when fall comes, whether we’re going to be working 40 hours a week. A lot of us are going to lose hours, lose health insurance and all the benefits that come with working there. I really just want them to understand that requesting daily room cleaning will help us retain our jobs and our hours and be able to feed our families. Also to be able to have that kind of work-life balance. We’re able to come home and still enjoy our families. —As told to AJ Vicens

Meybel Landaverde, a host at Urban Tavern, a restaurant at San Francisco’s Union Square Hilton

We didn’t work the whole pandemic last year because the hotel was completely closed. The hotel just opened recently in May. So they’ve called people from the housekeeping department and the janitor and the night department. They don’t call any servers, any hostesses. They say they are going to reopen the restaurant. I don’t know when. But the thing is, I really feel so sad, scared. I have to pay bills, and I have to support my nieces with money for food and things like that. Here in San Francisco, everything is so expensive.

I’m a little bit angry because the owner of my hotel says they want to switch the restaurants to grab-and-go. So my position is threatened. They don’t give me any information about it, but the owner says he really wants to do that. That makes me feel very scared because I have been working there for 17 years and I think we have good benefits, and I don’t want to lose it.

I’m upset with the company’s CEO because they really threaten my work specifically. They want to switch to grab-and-go and there is no option for me to work there. I feel really scared and mad because I don’t think he’s seen our challenges right now to pay for things. He doesn’t have that challenge in his life. And the CEO made $55 million last year. I don’t think it’s fair.

They don’t honor that we’re so loyal. But for me it’s really hard—I want to see that he changes his mind, and I think it’s good to tell them that if he can do the right thing, it’s going to help us. —As told to Andrea Guzman

This story is part of our Bad Bosses project, a reported collection of accounts from workers about their terrible bosses and the system that creates them. You can read more about the entire project and find every story here. Annotations—highlighted throughout—can be clicked for further context and comment from other parties. Got your own bad boss story? Send us an email.

There are the typical numbers you might see, specific to the war in Afghanistan: $2.3 trillion spent; 2,443 American service members killed, along with 3,846 US contractors; and an estimated 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians killed. Widening the scope, analyses of data from all the US post-9/11 war-on-terror violence paint an even starker picture: $6.4 trillion in direct spending on wars and war-related costs; 800,000 killed directly in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere; 38 million displaced; and “counterterrorism” operations in 85 countries.

But that’s still not a full accounting of US foreign and domestic military and related activity in the wake of 9/11. A new study from the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies calculates that over the 20 years since 9/11, the United States has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression,” when analyzed holistically.

“Twenty years later, the War on Terror has fed a sprawling security apparatus that was designed for counterterrorism but has also taken on immigration, crime, and drugs,” the report’s authors wrote.

The policy and spending choices made in this era have “turbo-charged militarism and xenophobia” internationally and domestically, they wrote, and have “driven some of the deepest divisions in US politics, including the growing threats of white supremacy and authoritarianism.”

And although some of the ill effects are hard to measure monetarily, there are figures that can be cited, the paper argues. For the military, the cost has been $16 trillion, including $7.2 trillion for military contracts. Additionally, the authors tabulated $3 trillion for veterans’ programs, $948 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, and $731 billion for federal law enforcement.

Some may find the $21 trillion figure over-inclusive, since most of these agencies would have spent considerable sums even in the absence of the 9/11 attacks. But the authors argue that spending on federal law enforcement programs is relevant “because the militarization of police and the proliferation of mass incarceration both owe much to the activities and influences of federal law enforcement. The same agencies use the same militarized tactics to combat terrorism, crime, and narcotics.” Additionally, they argue, federal law enforcement agencies operate domestically and globally and frequently collaborate with the Department of Defense.

“Over the last 20 years,” they wrote, “[defense] contractors took in more than $7.2 trillion in DoD funds, compared to only $4.7 trillion in the 20 years before that, which included the peak years of the Cold War and nuclear weapons.”

The Department of Homeland Security is included because of its post-9/11 origins and mission, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of DHS, is not included. Federal law enforcement makes the cut due to its heavy counterterrorism and border security missions. “The same agencies use the same militarized tactics to combat terrorism, crime, and narcotics,” the authors wrote. 

The authors argued that for far less money, the country could have funded major projects such as fully decarbonizing the US electric grid, wiping away student debt, guaranteeing preschool for young children, and increasing pay for teachers. Post-9/11 spending on the War on Terror and its outgrowths “is proof of concept that the US government has both the means and the political will to act on its priorities,” the authors wrote, making the case that a different path was possible.

“The militarization of US domestic and foreign policy over the past two decades has wreaked havoc,” the authors wrote. “It has cost lives and well-being for those caught up in our foreign wards and our domestic crackdowns alike, and has cost a fortune in the process.”

As the Biden administration struggles to defend its slipshod management of the US exit from Afghanistan, the stateside blame game is already in full force. Republicans see an opportunity to hammer Biden while simultaneously downplaying or outright attempting to delete their own history and role in championing a hasty retreat. Biden administration officials are blaming intelligence failures and a lack of will from Afghan security forces, and intelligence officials are blaming the politicians.

But the new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko—the official tasked by Congress with monitoring US government spending in Afghanistan—says there’s plenty of blame to go around. SIGAR issues an annual report on the state of the war in Afghanistan, and Sopko’s latest one, released at midnight on Monday night, not only delivers a blistering critique of US actions in Afghanistan but offers lessons for decision-makers for the next time the US government takes over a country and seeks to rebuild it.

“Twenty years later, much has improved, and much has not in Afghanistan,” Sopko writes. “If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and post little threat to the US national security interests, the overall picture is bleak.”

Sopko notes improvements in life expectancy, GDP, and literacy since the US invasion. But he adds, “Despite these gains, the key question is whether they are commensurate with the U.S. investment or sustainable after a U.S. drawdown. In SIGAR’s analysis, they are neither.”

Sopko writes that the myriad problems and challenges his office and other oversight bodies identified over 13 years—spanning 427 audits, 191 special project reports, 52 quarterly reports, and 10 lessons-learned reports—is “staggering.” Stephen Hadley, a former national security adviser to former President George W. Bush, who launched the war in Afghanistan in October 2001, told Sopko that the US government doesn’t “have a post-conflict stabilization model that works. Every time we have one of these things, it is a pick-up game. I don’t have confidence that if we did it again, we would do any better.”

Sopko’s report goes in depth on seven lessons from the failed campaign: incoherent strategy, timelines divorced from reality and past experience, unsustainable institutions and projects, poorly trained and inexperienced staffing (American and otherwise), persistent lack of security, a failure to understand and apply cultural context, and the inability to accurately measure results while simultaneously declaring “success.”

For years, Sopko’s office has issued detailed reports about corruption, ineptitude, and wasted money. Vice News recently highlighted examples emblematic of the American approach, such as a $36 million military base that was never used and the roughly $8.62 billion spent on counternarcotics operations between 2002 and 2017, only for Afghanistan to remain the world’s largest opium producer (as of 2018) and for opium poppy to remain the country’s top cash crop.

Sopko’s new report notes that even as policymakers say there’s not much appetite for missions on the scale of the 20-year Afghanistan effort, there are still reasons they should heed these lessons. Reconstruction missions are expensive—all war-related costs for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan over the last 20 years come to roughly $6.4 trillion—and “they usually go poorly,” Sopko writes.

“Widespread recognition that they go poorly has not prevented US officials from pursuing them,” he writes, and “[r]ebuilding countries mired in conflict is actually a continuous US government endeavor.” These missions “usually start small,” he adds, so it wouldn’t be hard for the United States to “slip down this slope again somewhere else and for the outcome to be similar to that of Afghanistan.”

That’s according to a new piece published Friday by Marina Koren in The Atlantic. Koren convincingly argues that the proposed lunar landing in late 2024—which the Trump administration saw, at least partially, as a political feather for Trump’s cap, along with the creation of Space Force—is clearly behind schedule. Delays in the development in the modern redesign of the spacesuit, along with budget overruns coupled with budget shortfalls, may make the 2024 “no longer a realistic target,” Steve Jurcyzk, the acting NASA administrator in February, told Ars Technica. As such, Koren argues, the Biden administration “could slough off the 2024 goal easily enough.”

Instead, the administration is pushing forward with the 2024 goal, even if “it’s a stretch” and “a challenge,” according to current Administrator Bill Nelson.

Koren points out that Biden has plenty to deal with—the pandemic, infrastructure, climate change—and noted in an earlier piece that 2018 polling found the public preferred that NASA’s main focus be climate research. In 2019 just 8 percent of Americans said a moon landing should be the agency’s top priority, with a majority supporting climate research and national security-related missions.

Perhaps the answer has more to do with national security than national pride. On the same day that Biden met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva to discuss election meddling, human rights, and ransomware, the Chinese government was showing off its success in getting its new space station operational. Former Vice President Mike Pence said in 2019 that there was a new “space race” afoot akin to the 1960s, “and the stakes are even higher.”

Even still, NASA’s internal investigator said this week that the 2024 landing is “not feasible.” Koren reported that a NASA spokesperson said that the budget and timeline for the mission are being evaluated and that the agency “will provide an update later this year.” Safety is a priority, the spokesperson said, “and NASA will put humans on the moon when it is safe to do so.”

“The country has entered yet another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the FDA is especially cognizant that immunocompromised people are particularly at risk for severe disease,” Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, said in a statement. “After a thorough review of the available data, the FDA determined that this small, vulnerable group may benefit from a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna Vaccines.” The New York Times reported that an estimated 3 percent of Americans would fall under this designation for a variety of reasons.

Woodcock said non-immunocompromised people who are full vaccinated “are adequately protected and do not need an additional dose” at this time, but that the FDA is “actively engaged in a science-based, rigorous process with our federal partners to consider whether an additional dose may be needed in the future.”

The news comes as the Delta variant of COVID-19 makes its march through communities across the country, and hospitals in places such as Texas and Florida reach or exceed covid-related hospitalization rates not seen since last fall. The Florida Hospital Association reported earlier this week that 68 percent of hospitals there expect to reach a “critical staffing shortage,” the Palm Beach Post reported Friday, with pre-pandemic medical staff shortages having been exacerbated by the pandemic. That, combined with the recent surge in cases, has “dozens” of hospitals there stopping elective surgeries, the paper reported.

Since the start of the pandemic last year, over 619,000 Americans have died from the disease. As the Delta variant spreads throughout the country, the US is now averaging an additional 616 deaths per day as of August 12, a 92 percent increase from two weeks ago. Cases have also rose precipitously, averaging 125,894 per day, a 76 percent increase. And while increases in cases are more worrisome in areas of the country with lower vaccination rates, as Delta rages areas of the country that were successfully on getting their populations vaccinated are also becoming hotspots for infection.

Computer security experts have so far been underwhelmed by the event, which has been dominated by Lindell’s reading stories about himself on stage and ranting about the media. But late Tuesday, the event took a turn when Tina Peters, the top election official in Mesa County, Colorado, took the stage and claimed that her office had been “invade[d]” and “raided” by investigators with Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office as part of an investigation into a breach in election security. The investigation was launched after materials from her office made their way to Ron Watkins, who has achieved fame among Trump supporters for his alleged role in the QAnon conspiracy and his claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

On Wednesday, computer files apparently associated with the Mesa County election system were presented and analyzed live on a giant screen behind the stage by Watkins, who beamed into the event via livestream. In a confusing back and forth, Watkins told the crowd that his lawyer instructed him to say that the files were from hard drives taken “without authorization” from Peters’ office, and the hard drives should be returned to the clerk, and “we should stop this data review.” Peters then came on stage and said the the hard drives did not come from her office, “unless it happened during the raid.” Watkins then spoke again, saying that the drives made their way to him via Sheronna Bishop, a right-wing activist from Colorado who was reportedly one of Rep. Lauren Boebert’s campaign managers in 2020.

Griswold’s office on Wednesday could not immediately answer questions about the files presented at the symposium.

If the files are, in fact, from copies of the election management system’s hard drive, that would be a huge security breach, says Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan and one of the country’s foremost experts on election equipment security.

“It would be much easier to launch an attack against [election management systems] if the attacker had a copy,” Halderman says. “That would let them develop and test an attack method tailored to the specific software and system configuration, which could then be launched with only temporary access by a non-technical accomplice.” 

Griswold, a Democrat, issued a statement Tuesday saying she’d ordered Peters, a vocal Trump supporter with a history of promoting the idea that the election was a “fraud,” to “comply with inspection of election equipment, video footage, and other documents in the county” to prove that “chain of custody remains in tact and that there has been no unauthorized access to voting equipment in the county.”

A day earlier, Griswold’s office issued a statement saying that the situation “constitutes a serious breach of voting system security protocols, as well as a violation” of state election laws.

On May 25, local and state election officials held a routine meeting with Dominion representatives; portions of that meeting were apparently captured surreptitiously in a video that included passwords related to the voting equipment, and the video appears to have been shared with Watkins. A week later, Gateway Pundit, a conservative news outlet, reported on the video, claiming that a whistleblower had given Watkins information proving that Dominion voting machines connect to the internet and that Dominion employees could remotely access election systems—purported evidence of the grand conspiracy promoted by Trump and some of his supporters.

On Thursday, Griswold announced at a press conference that Mesa County allowed an unauthorized person, identified as Gerald Wood, to attend the May 25 meeting, in violation of Colorado election rules, and lied to the secretary of state’s office about Wood’s eligibility to be there. (People attending such meetings are required to undergo background checks.)

Griswold further alleged that Peters’ office compromised the security of county equipment by directing county staff to turn off required video surveillance of the equipment prior to the May 25 meeting, and that the cameras were not turned back on until some point in August. Additionally, after the machines were opened for inspection during the May 25 meeting, seals on the machines were not replaced for one to two days. The result is that 41 pieces of voting equipment can no longer be used and will have to be replaced at the county’s expense.

“We are seeing a coordinated effort to undermine confidence in elections in the path to suppress the vote nationwide,” Griswold said. She called the episode “a shame” and added that it’s “horrible for the state of Colorado to have an elected elections official knowingly allow a breach of security and also spread disinformation.”

“In an attempt to demonstrate that Donald Trump was still the rightful president, a county clerk tweeted that the election machines she was in charge of overseeing were in fact vulnerable, and in order to prove it someone in her office allegedly carried out the very breach she was falsely claiming must have been committed by anti-Trump forces,” the Bulwark‘s Tim Miller wrote of the episode earlier this week.

Griswold referred questions about potential criminal prosecution to a local district attorney, who is investigating the matter, according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. Additionally, the county might be forced to refund nearly $170,000 in COVID-19 relief funds provided to the county as part of the 2020 CARES Act.

This story has been updated to include information from Griswold’s press conference.

The suits bring the total number of suits filed by Dominion Voting Systems against prominent propagators of such conspiracies to seven, according to the Wall Street Journal: It had already sued Fox News, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, and former Trump attorney Sidney Powell.

Byrne has established himself as one of driving forces of misinformation and disinformation about the 2020 election, pouring his money into the effort. The America Project, his nonprofit, reportedly provided $3.25 million to the organization behind the “audit” in Maricopa County, Arizona, and has produced a book and a movie, The Deep Rig, laying out his case. Dominion’s lawyers also allege that Byrne provided a private jet to a team that traveled to Michigan to produce a widely debunked and error-ridden report on alleged election rigging in that state.

The suit against Byrne alleges that he decided months before the 2020 election that it would be stolen and, after the election, “manufactured and promoted fake evidence to convince the world…of a massive international conspiracy among China, Venezuelan and Spanish companies, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, prominent Republicans, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Dominion.”

When it comes to Byrne’s motivations, Dominion’s lawsuit focuses on how he could gain financially by attacking their company. Byrne has reportedly invested more than $200 million in blockchain technology, including, Dominion’s lawyers allege, with companies looking to profit from promoting its use in smartphone voting.

The company’s suits seek $1.6 billion in damages from all three parties, plus additional money to pay for security and “expenses incurred combatting the disinformation campaign.”

“Between the imminent release of the Maricopa Audit, and Mike Lindell’s current activities in South Dakota, Dominion Voting is about to have a very difficult week,” Byrne told Mother Jones in response to a request for comment on the lawsuit. “They are simply doing this as a distraction.”

The suits were filed the same day that Lindell—whose company MyPillow Inc. has counter-sued Dominion—planned to launch his so-called “Cyber Symposium.” The online event was organized by Lindell and other conspiracists who say they can prove Trump’s election victory was stolen as part of the kind of sprawling international conspiracy that Byrne has helped propagate. The event was apparently delayed due to technical glitches. Lindell blamed them on an “attack” from unnamed forces.

This post has been updated to include comment from Patrick Byrne.