Suspicious emails to Vt. town clerks traced to Yale Law School

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2016 Telegraph Publishing LLC

A survey by a Yale University Law School professor set town clerks throughout Vermont and election officials in at least 11 other states on edge just before Election Day, and has been pulled after the intervention of a nationwide association that represents Secretaries of State.

Just one week before the presidential election, town clerks across Vermont received emails regarding voting procedures ahead of Nov. 8.  That, in itself, would not be unusual but these emails gave many clerks pause.

First, the source of the emails was not an account at Yahoo, G-mail or another familiar provider, but from two obscure sources – ajnmail.net and ez-webmail.com.

In an election year fraught with charges of voter fraud and election rigging from Republican nominee Donald Trump, the emails were asking questions about election procedures. And then, in these small Vermont towns, the e-mailers were unknown to the clerks nor were they registered to vote.

Wary clerks checked into the emails to find that other clerks were receiving the same emails in different forms.

Here are two examples:

My name is Gregory and I hope you are well. I found your contact information in a voting resources directory and I want to ask about the voting process. What do I need to bring to vote? I want to vote for Trump for president but I did not register as a Republican. Do I have to do that before I vote. And if I have to work late will I still be able to vote in time.
Thank you,
Gregory Walsh

 

My name is Gregory and I hope you are well. I found your contact information in a voting resources directory and I want to ask about the voting process. What do I need to bring to vote? I want to vote for Hillary for president but I did not register as a Democrat. Do I have to do that before I vote. And if I have to work late will I still be able to vote in time.
Thank you,
Gregory Walsh

Other emails using the same wording were sent from the same email provider using the name Mustafa Ahmed.

Another set of emails using simpler questions were also arriving from “ez-webmail.com” bearing names like Darryl Williams, Darnell Alexander and DeAndre Scott.

A number of town clerks contacted Will Senning, the director of elections at the Vermont Secretary of State’s office. In an email on Tuesday, Nov. 1, Senning acknowledged the “generic” emails and suggested that the clerks “ignore and delete” them. He also went on to make it clear that only a “very limited number of people” whose voter registration is not complete may be asked for identification at the polls. According to Chester Town Clerk Deb Aldrich, the number of people in that category in Chester is six out of a voter checklist of more than 2,000.

What Senning and the Vermont clerks didn’t know at that time was that their counterparts in other states were getting the same emails and asking similar questions.

“At first, we thought it was spam,” said New Hampshire Assistant Secretary of State Anthony Stevens, “but it didn’t make sense.” So Stevens did a Google search for one of the email providers and found that ajnmail.net had been used by Harvard doctoral candidates in conducting a 2012 study titled What Do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials. That study was conducted weeks, rather than days before the election.

Stevens told The Telegraph that he reached out to the authors of that study to learn that they had nothing to do with the recent emails but that perhaps someone else had picked up the study and was following up on it. In fact, the email domain that the Harvard study had used – ajnmail.net – had expired after that study and Internet records show it had been re-registered on Oct. 27, 2016.

At the same time that the Vermont Secretary of State’s office was fielding questions, the National Association of Secretaries of State was working with authorities to find the source of the emails.  Late in the day on Wednesday Nov. 2, NASS Executive Director Leslie Reynolds emailed members of her organization that the ajnmail.net emails had come from the Yale University Law School and that a professor there had been doing a study as part of his own academic research. That professor was later identified as Dr. Ian Ayres, a lawyer and economist who also teaches in the Yale School of Management.

In Reynolds’ email, she told her members that she had spoken with Ayres and that he would not send anymore emails. She also noted that the source of the ez-webmail.com emails had not yet been identified and that the Department of Homeland Security was aware of the issue.

The weeks leading up to a general election – especially in areas where there are also local questions like the wind proposal in Grafton and Windham – are busy and stressful for town clerks, some of whom are part-time employees.

Describing it as “robo-email,” Grafton Town Clerk Kim Record said, “It’s very tiring and there’s so much to do (ahead of the election), you should be on this end.”

Londonderry Town Clerk Kelly Pajala said she ended up seeing the chatter among town clerks in her email even before she got to those in question.

“If there hadn’t been the recommendation (from the Secretary of State’s office) I would have responded with the appropriate information because that’s what we are supposed to do,” said Pajala. “But really, now? It’s a little irritating to be answering someone who’s not a real person.”

Numerous attempts to reach Ayres for comment – by email and by phone between Thursday Nov. 3 and Tuesday Nov. 8 – were unsuccessful. Janet Conroy, director of communications for the Yale Law School, told The Telegraph on Friday that she had not been able to contact Ayres. On Monday, she reiterated that through a staff member.