National: Hacking the US Election ‘Possible’ But Difficult, Experts Say | VoA News

As recently as 2014, you could drive into the parking lot at certain Virginia polling places, connect to the voting machines inside by Wi-Fi and have your way with the vote tallies. That gaping hole in election security has been plugged. Virginia dropped these machines last year. But with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggesting the November election may be rigged, and security officials blaming Russia for a politically sensitive hack of the Democratic National Committee, election cybersecurity is getting a closer look. The risks are real, experts say, though it’s another question how likely they are to happen. “It’s possible for a sophisticated attacker to hack the machines and start stealing votes,” says University of California at Berkeley computer science professor David Wagner. Wagner worked on a 2007 statewide review of California’s voting system. “Every voting machine that’s been studied is susceptible,” he says. “It would be challenging,” he adds. “It would require considerable technical sophistication. And it would require someone to be physically present in each county, tampering with at least one machine.

National: Happy birthday, 19th Amendment! | Constitution Daily

Today, we celebrate the anniversary of the 19th Amendment (ratified on August 18, 1920).

Full Text of the 19th Amendment: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Constitution has never prohibited women from voting and for many years before the adoption of this amendment women did vote in several states. The 19th amendment established a uniform rule for all states to follow in guaranteeing women this right. The states ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920 after a long campaign by advocates, who achieved limited success changing state laws. The women’s suffrage movement started in the era of the Andrew Jackson administration.

National: Native Americans plan to make history in the US election | BBC

More Native Americans are participating in the 2016 election than ever before. Eight indigenous candidates are running for Congress, up from two in 2014. Over 90 are running for state legislatures, again exceeding previous years. Hillary Clinton ran campaign ads in Navajo and met with tribal leaders in Iowa, Washington, Arizona and California during the presidential primaries. Bernie Sanders met with 90 leaders in total, a political record. “This is the best campaign ever in Indian Country,” says Nicole Willis, member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla and former advisor to Bernie Sanders. “There’s no question about that.” Native Americans, who make up approximately 1.7% of the US population, are unlikely to determine a presidential election. But they do play an important role in shaping local politics and swinging votes for seats in Congress. But why is 2016 proving to be such a vibrant year for indigenous politics?

National: Rutgers study: Disabled are ‘neglected’ voting bloc | USA Today

Voters with disabilities outnumber minority groups and could prove a powerful voting bloc — if they’re ever given easy access to polling places on Election Day. According to a new report from the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, about 35.4 million disabled people will be eligible to vote in the November 2016 election, a larger group than African American or Hispanic voters. It represents an increase of nearly 11 percent since 2008, a higher rate of growth than among voters without disabilities. The trick is turning those eligible voters into likely voters, Rutgers professor Douglas Kruse said. According to the report, only 46 percent of eligible disabled voters are projected to actually cast a vote.

Editorials: The Cybersecurity Stakes Of Election 2016 | Tony Bradley/Forbes

We have less than 90 days to go until Election Day 2016. Citizens across the United States will go to the polls to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—or possibly one of the alternative candidates, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, or Evan McMullin. There is a lot at stake in any general election, but this one feels more important than most—especially as it relates to cybersecurity. Security itself is certainly not new—I’ve worked in computer and network security for years. In May of 2013, however, a lot changed. The revelations of the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden shook the foundations of computer security and the mechanics of data intelligence. It seems there are corporate, government, and military data breaches on a regular basis. We have entered into a sort of Cold War of cyber espionage, and the stakes and consequences continue to escalate.

Verified Voting Blog: Security against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence

This article was originally posted to Freedom to Tinker on August 17, 2016.

There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked.  Should the U.S. Government designate all the states’ and counties’ election computers as “critical cyber infrastructure” and prioritize the “cyberdefense” of these systems?  Will it make any difference to activate those buzzwords with less than 3 months until the election? First, let me explain what can and can’t be hacked.  Election administrators use computers in (at least) three ways:

  1. To maintain voter registration databases and to prepare the “pollbooks” used at every polling place to list who’s a registered voter (for that precinct); to prepare the “ballot definitions” telling the voting machines who are the candidates in each race.
  2. Inside the voting machines themselves, the optical-scan counters or touch-screen machines that the voter interacts with directly.
  3. When the polls close, the vote totals from all the different precincts are gathered (this is called “canvassing”) and aggregated together to make statewide totals for each candidate (or district-wide totals for congressional candidates).

Any of these computers could be hacked.  What defenses do we have?  Could we seal off the internet so the Russians can’t hack us?  Clearly not; and anyway, maybe the hacker isn’t the Russians—what if it’s someone in your opponent’s political party?  What if it’s a rogue election administrator?

To maintain voter registration databases and to prepare the “pollbooks” used at every polling place to list who’s a registered voter (for that precinct); to prepare the “ballot definitions” telling the voting machines who are the candidates in each race.
Inside the voting machines themselves, the optical-scan counters or touch-screen machines that the voter interacts with directly.
When the polls close, the vote totals from all the different precincts are gathered (this is called “canvassing”) and aggregated together to make statewide totals for each candidate (or district-wide totals for congressional candidates).
Any of these computers could be hacked. What defenses do we have? Could we seal off the internet so the Russians can’t hack us? Clearly not; and anyway, maybe the hacker isn’t the Russians—what if it’s someone in your opponent’s political party? What if it’s a rogue election administrator?

Voting Blogs: EAC Continues to Collect and Share Essential Election Administration Data | EAC Blog

Earlier this month, the EAC released two videos from experts in the field about how to visualize elections data and how visualizing these data can be used in policy and budget discussions. And last week the Pew Charitable Trusts released its most recent iteration of the Elections Performance Index (EPI) with data from the 2014 elections, using 17 indicators to examine how states administer elections. What do these videos and the EPI have in common? Both highlight or use data from the EAC’s very own Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS) – for example more than half of the EPI’s indicators use data from the EAVS. This survey is the only effort to gather in-depth election administration data from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. And of course it is hardworking state and local election officials who supply these data to the EAC, responding to this massive survey every two years.

Louisiana: Elections chief already making plans to carry on following flood | USA Today

Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler said his staff is already making preparations to set up mobile voting precincts where needed as well as processes to reach displaced voters even though the fall election is months away. Schedler and his communications director Meg Casper said they are beginning assessments of polling places and their viability following devastating flooding in southern Louisiana. Early voting for the Nov. 8 election begins Oct. 25. “The good news is we’ve done this before,” said Schedler, referring to elections following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Missouri: St. Louis Election Board asks local prosecutor and U.S. attorney to review allegations of voter fraud | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The Election Board of Commissioners has referred allegations of voter fraud in the race for the 78th District state representative to the city’s top prosecutor and the U.S. attorney’s office. “The written complaint received this morning contained the serious allegation that evidence exists of illegal activity regarding the absentee ballot process,” the commissioners wrote in a news release Wednesday afternoon, in explaining its action. The action was taken after a large group of residents walked into the downtown Election Board offices Wednesday morning, asking to talk with Democratic Director Mary Wheeler-Jones. Each person had in hand a signed form letter, alleging that absentee ballots cast in the Aug. 2 primary race between newcomer Bruce Franks and incumbent Penny Hubbard were “obtained illegally, were tampered with, or both.”

Texas: Ex-CIA officer running for president will sue Texas to get on ballot | Dallas Morning News

Independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin, an ex-CIA officer and congressional policy wonk who launched his campaign last week to offer “Never Trump” Republicans a conservative option, faces a steep political challenge gaining enough support to affect the November election. And by jumping into the race so late, McMullin will need to clear significant legal hurdles, as well. Filing deadlines for independent candidates in more than half of the states have already passed, and several more deadlines are fast approaching. That will mean going to court — including in Texas, where an independent had to gather nearly 80,000 signatures by May. “Our intention in Texas is to file a legal challenge, and we think that the great people of Texas will agree with us that there shouldn’t be artificial boundaries on the kinds of people that can run for president,” said Joel Searby, the campaign’s chief strategist.

Gabon: Opposition chooses Ping as candidate for August 27 election | Reuters

Gabon’s main opposition parties chose former foreign minister Jean Ping as their candidate in an election on Aug. 27 against President Ali Bongo, who is standing for a second term. Ping, aged 74, is considered one of Africa’s foremost diplomats. He has served as chairman of the African Union commission and as president of the U.N. General Assembly. “I understand the gravity of the task I have been given,” Ping told thousands of cheering supporters in Libreville. “I won’t disappoint you.” Ping has an unusual history for an African politician. His father was a Chinese businessman who came to Gabon in the 1930s, married the daughter of a traditional chief and grew rich trading goods including timber and seafood. Ping came to wealth and prominence as an ally and protege of Omar Bongo, the father of Ali Bongo. But he fell out with the son and resigned from the ruling party in 2014 to become a vehement government critic.

Kenya: Kenya clears out electoral officials after deadly protests | Reuters

Kenya will replace its top electoral officials, a cross-party parliamentary committee said on Tuesday, granting victory to the opposition which had branded them biased and led protests for them to be sacked. Nine new commissioners will take over the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission well before next August’s general election, a key demand of Raila Odinga’s opposition CORD coalition which said it had feared a rigged vote. At least four people died in protests that CORD had been staging weekly, raising concerns of a return to ethnic violence that killed 1,200 people after a disputed election in 2007.

Russia: Duma election: What to expect | New Eastern Europe

Over the past few years, the Russian authorities have been gradually rolling out a strategy for managing the upcoming State Duma election. What are the elements of this strategy, and will it help the Kremlin achieve its objectives? Like most modern authoritarian regimes which organise elections, the regime in Russia aspires to be viewed as broadly legitimate while keeping political pluralism highly constrained. These two objectives, evidently, are difficult to reconcile. In order to increase legitimacy, the regime allows more electoral competition, but at the same time it has an incentive to minimise competition, to which end it resorts to heavy-handed tactics including fraud, undermining its legitimacy. Electoral authoritarian regimes such as Russia’s employ idiosyncratic strategies to balance the dual objectives of maintaining legitimacy and limiting competition. They thereby face inevitable trade-offs in crafting their strategies and must regularly adapt them to account for changing circumstances. In the previous Duma election of 2011, the authorities sought to bank on the perceived strength of the ruling United Russia party and on the administrative capacity of the authorities (at different levels) to deliver required election results. This strategy had several flaws. Fewer people than anticipated were ready to vote for United Russia. Analyses of the voting results show that in many areas where no major election fraud was committed, only a quarter to a third of votes went to the ruling party. In order to get a (slight) majority of seats in the Duma, major election fraud was necessary. It was met by significant upheaval, mainly in the form of a wave of popular protests that drew the biggest crowds in Russia since the early 1990s. The fallout from the 2011 election was viewed in Russian political circles as a serious crisis.

Zambia: Opposition Party to Challenge Presidential Poll Outcome | VoA News

Zambia’s main opposition, the United Party for National Development (UPND), plans to petition the Constitutional Court on Friday regarding the outcome of the August 11 presidential poll won by incumbent President Edgar Lungu. The UPND also aims to stop the official installation of Lungu, which has been scheduled for next Tuesday. The Electoral Commission of Zambia declared Lungu the winner of the presidential election with 50.35 percent of the total votes cast, while the main opposition leader, Hakainde Hichilema from the UPND, garnered 47.67 percent of the votes.