Surveillance footage obtained by Fox News appears to show a man, later identified by the Montana Secretary of State’s Office as Laszlo Gendler, pulling on a drop box located in Glacier County, Montana, on Sunday. Gendler has known ties to the Democrat Party.

The election administrator for Glacier County, Crystal R. Cole, sent an email to the secretary’s office saying that Gendler looked “like he was tampering with the box,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The Federalist.

“Yesterday, on October 20th, at 10:25:05, Las[z]lo with the MT Dem Party was on camera tampering with the Box,” Cole’s email stated. “I did call him to ask him what his reasoning was, he stated ‘they’ sent him to the location to see how secure the box was. The MT Dem Party did not notify the Elections office in any way to state they would be sending someone to the Ballot Box to check how secure it was, so on camera it looks like he was tam[p]ering with the box.”

Richie Melby, communications director for the secretary’s office, told The Federalist that Cole alerted them to the issue and the state managed to confirm Gendler’s identity.

“Our Elections Director was pleased that the individual was not able to remove the ballot box from the wall, although the activity was obviously highly suspicious and concerning,” Melby said in a statement to The Federalist, adding that Gendler’s “name and details were turned over to Glacier County law enforcement.”

Democratic Senatorial Campaign

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are demanding more documents from the censorship service NewsGuard in their probe of the company’s collusion with federal “misinformation” monitors.

On Friday, House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky sent a letter to NewsGuard executives “to seek additional documents and communications” from the censorship group related to “present contracts with or grants administered by federal government agencies or any other government entity, including foreign governments.”

NewsGuard is one of the more popular web browser extensions deployed in K-12 classrooms across the country with the support of federal taxpayer funding. The service rates the credibility of online websites and redirects users to news organizations approved as regime friendly. Such ratings have been weaponized to censor non-leftist content with misinformation labels for factual reporting on stories such as Hunter Biden’s laptop.

[RELATED: Meet NewsGuard: The Government-Backed Censorship Tool Billed As An Arbiter Of Truth]

“The protection of First Amendment rights of American citizens is paramount and attempts by government actors to infringe on those rights is dangerous and misguided,” Comer wrote.

The House Oversight chief cited a recent statement from President Joe Biden’s former climate adviser, John Kerry, who complained about “disinformation” at a speech to the World Economic Forum.

“Our First Amendment,” Kerry said, “stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”

The remark, said Comer, “indicates that tendencies toward censorship and speech restrictions and government entanglement with censorship may have support from senior government officials.”

This week’s letter

No one should be shocked that Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system went down for about 90 minutes Thursday morning. The computer system on which most voting activities in the state hinge is a mess, and the state has known this for years.

Speaking on “The Dom Giordano Show” on Philadelphia’s WPHT talk radio, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt described the SURE system as a voter registration database that county boards of elections interface with “all day long.”

When voters register, request a ballot, are sent a ballot, or vote, every move is marked in the Sure System. More than 9 million Pennsylvania residents, every person registered to vote, have data in the SURE System.

“We had an outage for about 90 minutes that prevented many counties from connecting to it earlier this morning, but has been back up for a while now,” Schmidt said. “It was like 9:45 to 11:15 this morning. Voters who applied to vote by mail, whether it’s in person or whatever else, could still do so. It didn’t prevent any of that.”

The SURE System has had problems for a long time.

As I reported for The Epoch Times, in December 2019, Pennsylvania’s then-Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (who is now running for attorney general) wrote a scathing, 192-page report that found “internal control weaknesses in the SURE System related to input and maintenance of voter records. The audit revealed examples of potential inaccuracies, which the report said should be sent to