Montenegro: Voting In Election Billed As Russia Vs. West | RFERL

Montenegrins are heading to the polls on October 16 in a parliamentary election that is being billed as a choice between Russia and the West. The long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists is facing pro-Russian and pro-Serbian opposition groups that strongly oppose the country’s NATO bid and path toward joining the European Union. Pro-Western Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, who has led the tiny Balkan nation as president or prime minister for more than 25 years, is facing his toughest challenge yet to cling on to power. “Everyone is aware that the fate of the state will be decided…whether Montenegro will become a member of the EU and NATO or a Russian colony,” Djukanovic said on October 14 at an election rally. Some 530,000 registered voters will be voting for 17 lists, including a total of 34 parties.

Florida: Federal investigators find evidence Florida election-systems vendor was hacked | CNN

Federal investigators believe Russian hackers were behind cyberattacks on a contractor for Florida’s election system that may have exposed the personal data of Florida voters, according to US officials briefed on the probe. The hack of the Florida contractor comes on the heels of hacks in Illinois, in which personal data of tens of thousands of voters may have been stolen, and one in Arizona, in which investigators now believe the data of voters was likely exposed. The FBI, in the coming days, is preparing to provide updated guidance to state elections officials around the US aiming to help them spot suspicious activity on their computer networks. Several states have reported attempted scans of their computer systems, which often is a precursor to a breach.

National: Elections at Risk in Cyberspace, Part III: Vote Database Security Ultimately Could Determine an Election Result | SIGNAL Magazine

Any attempts to sabotage an election through cyber attacks ultimately would be geared to affecting the vote count, either to change the outcome of the race or to sow doubt on the validity of the election itself. Just as banks strive to secure their depositors’ assets, governments also work to ensure the fidelity of their election returns. But, as bank accounts are vulnerable to cyber attacks, so are vote totals—to varying degrees. While most tabulation databases are safe from everyday hacker threats, nation-states with highly advanced cyber operations theoretically might be able to mount an effective cyber attack on a U.S. national election by bringing their best offensive cyber capabilities to bear. State governments, which are responsible for the voting process, pay close attention to tabulation security. Ron Bandes is a network security analyst in the CERT division of the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He also is president of VoteAllegheny, a nonpartisan election integrity organization. Bandes points out that in many states, two tallies occur. One is done at the local level, usually by the county. The other is a statewide count comprising all the county totals. These counts are cross-validated. “The outputs from the voting machines have to match the inputs to the tally system,” Bandes points out.

National: Intelligence Analyst: Russian Cyberattacks Could Roil US Elections | VoA News

Malcolm Nance is extremely worried about what might happen as U.S. votes are tallied on Nov. 8, election night. A career U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence official with 33 years of experience, Nance said he had overwhelming evidence that Russia is seeking to interfere in U.S. elections to put “not just a finger, but their whole hand” on the scale to help Republican nominee Donald Trump and hurt Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Nance said a number of private companies had traced cyberattacks exposing potentially damaging Democratic Party emails and voicemails back to cyber “fingerprints” clearly identified in the past as those of Russian state hackers. He said the same fingerprints were found in what turned out to be Russian hacking of power plants in Ukraine and of the German parliament. … U.S. federal investigators believe Russian hackers are also behind cyberattacks on a contractor for Florida’s election system that may have exposed the personal data of Florida voters.

National: Two State Elections Databases Have Been Hacked. The Russians Aren’t the Only Suspects. | Mother Jones

Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan was in the backyard of her home last June when she got a call from her chief of staff. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘Can you sit down?'” Reagan told Mother Jones. He then said that her office had been “contacted by the FBI, and it looks like there’s a computer password and username that belongs to our database for sale on the dark web.” Reagan is the chief elections officer for the state of Arizona, and the credential that was for sale on the “dark web”—a collection of websites that hide their IP addresses to obscure where they’re hosted and who runs them—would potentially give the buyer access to a database containing personal information for nearly 4 million voters. With help from the FBI, the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, and the Arizona Department of Administration, Reagan and her staff determined that an employee in Gila County, Arizona, had opened a Microsoft Word document attached to an email. That document likely contained software that may have tracked the employee’s key strokes, which eventually led to the attacker getting a username and password to one of the state’s election-related databases.

National: 7 Ways Electronic Voting Systems Can Be Attacked | Dark Reading

Concerns about the fragility of US electronic voting systems to cyberattacks go back to 2002 when the Help America Vote Act was passed mandating the replacement of lever-based machines and punchcards with more modern voting equipment. Those concerns have been greatly amplified this election season with reports of attacks on voter registration systems in some 20 states and intrusions into the Democratic National Committee’s computers by hackers believed to be out of Russia. The attacks have stirred considerable fears about foreign adversaries and nation-state actors somehow disrupting the elections and even manipulating the outcome of the voting to favor one of the two major party candidates. … In all states but five, a vast majority of the electronic voting equipment that voters use will have paper backups. Some voters will use what are known as Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems to cast their votes electronically. Others will mark their choices on a paper ballot and feed it into an optical scanner that will do the ballot counting. In both cases, voters and election officials will have a so-called Voter Verifiable Paper Audit trail that will provide a reliable backup even if the machines fail or are somehow compromised.

National: Donald Trump, Slipping in Polls, Warns of ‘Stolen Election’ | The New York Times

Donald J. Trump has lashed out at fellow Republicans, calling them “disloyal” and “far more difficult” than Hillary Clinton. He has griped openly about a “rigged” political system, saying Wednesday he has “no respect” for the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates and complaining about a “defective” microphone in the first debate. And on Monday, at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., he worried the election could be “stolen” from him and singled out Philadelphia, a city with a large African-American population, warning, “We have to make sure we’re protected.” Mr. Trump’s ominous claims of a “stolen election” — which he often links to black, urban neighborhoods — are not entirely new. But in recent days, he has been pressing the theme with a fresh intensity, citing everything from the potential for Election Day fraud to media bias favoring Mrs. Clinton to rigged debates.

National: Trump Supporters Monitoring Polls Alarms Voting-Rights Groups | Bloomberg

For the first time in a half-century, Americans will go to the polls in November without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. Following a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling invalidating a key section of the 1965 law, the U.S. Department of Justice has had to curtail its federal observer program, under which trained monitors oversee access to ballot boxes in areas historically prone to discrimination. The shift comes just as Republican nominee Donald Trump has been exhorting his supporters to be vigilant about the supposed threat of voter fraud, which has been shown to be almost nonexistent in the U.S. “They’re letting people pour into the country so they can go and vote,” he said in an Oct. 7 meeting with the union representing U.S. Border Patrol agents. At a Pennsylvania rally on Oct. 10, he told the crowd, “So important that you watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us.” An online movement called Operation Red is encouraging Trump supporters to wear red to the polls so people “will have no choice but to acknowledge the visible truth in a sea of red,” according to the group’s website.

Editorials: It’s Time to Fix the Voting Process | Pippa Norris/New Republic

Experts rate the performance of recent American elections as the worst among two dozen Western democracies. Why? Some longstanding practices are to blame. Partisan gerrymandering insulates incumbents. Infotainment-dominated commercial news reduce campaigns to spectator sport. Social media amplifies angry trolls. Ballot access laws restrict third-party challengers. Women and minority candidates have to fight a hostile cultural backlash. Outdated technologies are vulnerable to Russian cyber hacks. All of these problems have been heightened by the close, heated, and bitterly divided 2016 contest. The result: an erosion of American confidence in the electoral process—despite the fact that voter fraud occurs very rarely. In mid-August, Gallup found that only six in ten Americans are “very” or “fairly” confident that their vote would be accurately cast and counted. That’s down from around three-quarters of all Americans a decade earlier.

Editorials: We Must Address Gerrymandering | Thomas E. Mann/TIME

The United States is an outlier in the democratic world in the extent to which politicians shape the rules that affect their own electoral fortunes. Federal campaign finance policy is administered by a feckless Federal Election Commission, whose three Democratic and three Republican commissioners routinely produce gridlock instead of effective implementation of the law. The conditions under which election ballots are cast and counted—from registration to voting equipment, ballot design, polling locations, voter ID requirements, absentee ballots and early voting—are set in a very decentralized fashion and prey to political manipulation to advantage one party over the other. And while most countries with single-member districts (such as Canada, Britain and Australia) use nonpartisan boundary commissions to redraw lines so they reflect population shifts, in America, most state legislatures create the maps for both congressional and state legislative districts through the regular legislative process. They make their own luck.

Voting Blogs: The Russian Hack of U.S. Election Systems is About Delegitimizing, Not Changing, the Result, and It Feeds Trump Vote-Rigging Claim | Election Law Blog

The headlines over the last few weeks are suggesting Russian “hacks” of U.S. election systems. But the kinds of election systems hacked are not the ones that would change election results (at least so far). Instead, I think the Russians are playing a different, also dangerous, game involving misinformation and disruption. Let’s start with what we know. We know that it is Russia behind the hacking. Most people know about the Wikileaks revelations from the Podesta emails, with the goal of embarrassing the Clinton administration and potentially affecting the outcome of the election. Maybe if Trump were not the opponent, these leaks would have more of an effect. But beyond that there have been numerous reports of Russian hackers going after U.S. election systems, such as going after the voter registration databases of Illinois and Arizona.

Alaska: High court decision gives House win to Westlake, resolving ballot issue | Associated Press

The Alaska Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court, and reinstated Dean Westlake as the winner of a disputed House election. “I’ve been dancing in my office for the last hour,” said Westlake’s attorney, Thomas Amodio. “They got it right. Four of them got it right, anyway, but that’s all that matters.” The court issued its two-page decision within five hours of hearing oral arguments in the case, with one judge partially dissenting. The high court had hoped to reach a quick decision so ballots could be shipped to villages in the Montana-sized House District 40 beginning Monday.

Arizona: After hack, Arizona working to keep its elections database secure | CBS

The hacking attempt on Arizona’s voter database started in rural Gila County when an elections worker opened an email attachment. Michelle Reagan, Arizona’s secretary of state, said it was malware meant to attack servers holding the voter information of 4 million people. Reagan was alerted by the FBI, and experts believe the Russian government is to blame. She said she was shocked and dismayed when she first heard about the breach. “We’ve never had to worry about foreign invaders coming in and trying to mess with our confidence and our election system,” Reagan said.

Florida: FBI: Russia likely hacked Florida election contractor and Clinton campaign chairman | SC Magazine

U.S. intelligence officials’ concerns of a Russian hacking operation against political targets continues to escalate, as FBI officials now believe Russian intelligence agencies likely orchestrated the hacks of emails belonging to a contractor for Florida’s election system and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Podesta’s emails were released in the latest batch of emails released by Wikileaks. Trump advisor Roger Stone admitted Wednesday that he had “back-channel communication” with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A day earlier, Podesta told Bloomberg on Tuesday that it is “a reasonable assumption or at least a reasonable conclusion” that the Trump campaign knew about the most recent WikiLeaks leaks before their release. He pointed to a tweet from Stone that claimed: “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

Editorials: An ill wind (and partisan politics) threatened Florida voting rights | Fred Grimm/Miami Herald

If this case had come out of a state other than Florida, the federal judge would have only been belaboring the obvious. But Judge Mark Walker knew that Gov. Rick Scott was in sore need of some basic civics. “No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live,” Judge Walker wrote, quoting the late Justice Hugo Black from a landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision. “Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.” In this case, Hurricane Matthew had contributed to the undermining. Hundreds of thousands of coastal residents had heeded Gov. Scott’s warning and fled inland as the storm menaced Florida. Government offices were closed. Mail delivery was disrupted. All this as the Oct. 11 registration deadline approached for Floridians hoping to cast ballots in the general election.

Georgia: Lawsuit seeks to extend voter registration deadline | Atlanta Journal Constitution

A federal judge has set a 10 a.m. Friday hearing in Savannah over a lawsuit seeking to reopen Georgia’s voter registration due to Hurricane Matthew. Voter advocates filed the suit Wednesday just before midnight, arguing that an emergency extension of the registration deadline was needed because some coastal residents forced to flee last weekend’s storm did not have enough opportunity to submit applications. The suit requests an extension through Oct. 18 for residents of Chatham County, where local government offices were closed for what would have been the last six days of the voter registration period that ended on Tuesday. It also suggests that the extension could be made available to residents statewide.

Indiana: Write-in candidates include ‘None of the Above’ | The Star Press

If you can’t make up your mind from this list of presidential candidates, you’re not trying. Sure, voters will see Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Libertarian Gary Johnson on their ballots on Nov. 8 and during ongoing early voting. But they’ll also have 15 write-in candidates for president to choose from, ranging from Green Party candidate Jill Stein to a guy who goes by the name Joe Exotic. Delaware County election officials caution that people who want to make their vote — even a write-in vote — count have to write in one of the 15 write-in candidates certified by the state. “If it’s not a certified write-in candidate, that office doesn’t get a vote,” Delaware County Clerk Mike King told The Star Press. So votes for Daffy D. Duck or Amanda Hugginkiss will not be counted. But voters will be able to write in Matthew “None of the Above” Roberts, a political science professor from Michigan who told a newspaper he wants to spark a “conversation” about the political system, or Richard Duncan, an economist from Ohio.

North Carolina: No extension for voter registration after Hurricane Matthew | News & Observer

The state will keep Friday as the deadline for regular voter registration, the State Board of Elections announced Wednesday, despite the upheaval in eastern counties awash in floodwater. Common Cause NC this week asked the elections board to extend the regular registration deadline to Oct. 19. On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, a Democrat representing counties hit by flooding after Hurricane Matthew, asked the state elections board to reconsider extending the deadline. “It would be a travesty to look at the dire situation that is being endured by people in these communities who are fighting against unparalleled flooding and not grant them additional days so that they can register to vote and exercise their fundamental right in November,” Butterfield said in a statement.

Pennsylvania: As GOP warns of voter fraud, Democrats quietly register more poll watchers in ‘fraud-filled’ Philadelphia | PennLive

It’s been the secret and sometimes not-so-secret front of this election: Behind the scenes, efforts are underway on both sides of the aisle to amass armies of eagle-eyed volunteers to be dispatched to the polls on Nov. 8 to watch for signs of voter fraud. But in Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold where Republican Donald Trump has warned the possibility of voter fraud is particularly acute, officials say it is the Democrats who lead in registering poll watchers, despite more oft-invoked Republican concerns about the integrity of the city’s electoral process. “Out of 66 wards, approximately 33 wards have applied on the Democratic side [to have lists of poll watching volunteers vetted and approved],” Joe Lynch, an assistant administrator of election activities with the city, told PennLive on Tuesday. By comparison, Republicans have only submitted such lists for 8 wards, Lynch added.

Virginia: GOP state lawmaker calls for removal of Virginia’s top election official | Richmond Times-Dispatch

A committee meeting on Virginia’s election readiness turned into a bitter partisan fight Thursday as a Republican state lawmaker called for the removal of the state’s top election official and Democrats accused the GOP of following Donald Trump’s lead by casting doubt on the upcoming election. The proceedings turned heated after Virginia Department of Elections Commissioner Edgardo Cortés, an appointee of Gov. Terry McAuliffe, took the podium to defend the state’s preparations after roughly a dozen election officials from across Virginia vented about a voter system they described as technologically deficient, underfunded, and susceptible to low-level abuse that often goes unpunished. … McAuliffe’s office said the governor has no plans to replace Cortés.

Wisconsin: Federal judge issues ‘targeted remedy’ for problems with voter ID law | The Cap Times

The state of Wisconsin must immediately provide more information to help people seeking state-issued voting credentials navigate the complex process, a federal judge ordered Thursday. U.S. District Judge James Peterson declined to suspend the state’s voter ID law before the November election, arguing he doesn’t have the authority to issue a “brand new injunction” and that it might be “unwise” to make sweeping changes less than a month from Election Day. Instead, the judge opted to focus on providing a “targeted remedy” to issues with the ID petition process, or IDPP, which is designed to help people who don’t have the proper documentation obtain IDs. “What we are doing here is to patch it up, get it in good enough shape to get us through the November election,” Peterson said, adding that a previous court order he issued in July mandates a fundamental reform of the process after the election.

Cambodia: Young Voters Face Disenfranchisement | Khmer Times

Young potential voters who have migrated abroad in search of work are facing the loss of their voting rights due to a lack of information and documents required to register to vote from a location different to their registered address, civil society groups said yesterday. During a workshop on “The Challenges and Solutions: Voter Registration for Youth,” in Phnom Penh, Yong Kim Eng, president of the People Center for Development and Peace (PDP-Center) said that according to their data, many youths were unaware of how to register to vote in next year’s commune elections. “Youths are more than half of the country’s citizens, some of whom are migrants working in foreign countries and are facing the loss of their right to vote if they do not go to register. This is a concern as there might be a problem for the democratic process if the youth do not participate.”

Congo: Role for Berlin in salvaging DR Congo elections? | Deutsche Welle

The fate of DR Congo seems to hinge on President Kabila’s apparent bid to stay in power. Berlin is being asked to help resolve a crisis, as Congolese recall how it financially supported their elections in 2006. No matter which radio station one listens to in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the main issue is the current political crisis and the dialogue which is attempting to resolve it. Everyone is hoping for a breakthrough. But after more than a month since dialogue between government and a section of the opposition began, many questions remain unanswered as the clock ticks toward December 19, the day when President Joseph Kabila term in office officially ends. At the beginning of October, the electoral commission announced that elections would be postponed until December 2018. The commission said it would not be possible to register all voters and then prepare for a poll originally slated for the end of 2016.

Montenegro: Prime Minister accuses Russia of financing anti-NATO campaign | Reuters

Russia is pouring money into Montenegro’s election campaign in an attempt to derail the country’s progress towards joining NATO, the country’s Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic said on Thursday, three days ahead of an election. Djukanovic, who has led the tiny Balkan country as president or prime minister for more than 25 years, is facing his toughest ever electoral challenge from opposition parties that accuse him of cronyism and of treating Montenegro as a personal fiefdom. In an interview with Reuters, he said opposition parties were being financed by Moscow, which saw Sunday’s parliamentary vote as a final opportunity to stop the Balkan region’s rush to integrate with the European Union and the Atlantic alliance.

United Kingdom: Tory MPs push for rules to ensure ID checks at polling stations | International Business Times

Tory MPs have urged the Government to get a move on in introducing new rules that would ensure people have to produce ID when they vote. Gary Streeter, representing the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, told the Commons on Thursday the commission has “recommended strongly since 2014” the use of ID at polling stations. He added: “It’s now a matter for Government and for this House to introduce this more robust new provision.” Sir Eric Pickles’ recent review into electoral fraud also backed introducing ID checks when people vote.

National: Elections at Risk in Cyberspace, Part II: Variety is the Spice of Hacking for Voting Machines | Signal Magazine

Election-day activities center on polling places and their voting machines, and this is where the public interest in vote security is most acute. Each state is in charge of acquiring and managing voting machines, and many states have different types of machines within their borders. The wide variety of voting machines used across the United States, rather than deterring hackers, actually helps empower them if they want to change the outcome of people’s votes, say many cybersecurity experts. Many voting machines are so old that modern security has not yet caught up to them. The differences among voting machines also mean that no single tactic could be employed to cause them to give misleading vote totals. Any coordinated effort to use the machines to affect voting outcomes would have to be tailored to each type of machine and would require an extensive network of operatives to be effective on a large scale. Some electronic voting machines still in use in the United States date back to the last millennium, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal nonpartisan policy and law institute connected with New York University School of Law. The oldest machines have all the security of an ATM—which is to say, very little. Newer machines still are vulnerable because they provide access points for cybermarauders to inject malware that could change votes outright.
Direct-reporting voting machines that offer no paper backup are the most vulnerable, states Chuck Brooks, vice president of government relations and marketing for Sutherland Government Solutions. Also, the diversity of electronic voting machines precludes any easy security fix. Few have had software updates, he says.

National: What it takes to secure the elections | TechCrunch

While virtually every industry and domain is flourishing and being revolutionized by technological advances, more than three-quarters of U.S. citizens will vote for their next president on paper ballots this November. The main reason for this is concern over cybersecurity threats against the electoral system and process. In the wake of major breaches, such as the hacking of the Democratic National Convention and attacks against voter registration databases in at least two states, it is now feared more than ever that the presidential elections might be influenced or compromised by nation-states such as Russia. And that’s why any form of technology being used in elections is generally frowned upon and regarded as a potential attack vector for malicious actors. But is this a pattern that has to repeat itself every four years? Are we doomed to choose our leaders in settings that one expert described to me as reminiscent of the dark ages for fear of major hacks, or is it possible to see future elections leverage the full power of the newest tech without fearing cyber threats?

National: Election cyber threats: More states request DHS help | CNN

More states and local election boards have asked the Department of Homeland Security to help with cybersecurity, the department announced Monday night. The total, which has been steadily rising in recent weeks, has reached 33 state and 11 county or local election agencies, DHS said. More than two dozen states were known to have requested help before the updated tally. DHS has been urging states to take advantage of its resources, which include scanning systems for vulnerabilities and recommendations for improving cybersecurity on election and voter registration systems. The update from Secretary Jeh Johnson warned those on the fence to make a decision.

National: Hurricane Matthew and Its Effect on Voting Rights | The Atlantic

Hurricane Matthew brought utter devastation to Haiti and other islands in the Caribbean after it swept through the region early last week. In Haiti, the storm killed at least a thousand people; damaged infrastructure advancements the nation had made in its push to modernize; and delayed a presidential election originally scheduled for early October. While the problems it’s caused on the eastern United States have been less dire, the storm has nevertheless had serious consequences in many communities. And, as in Haiti, its aftereffects may have repercussions on the country’s upcoming presidential election as well. Efforts to calculate the political costs of a disaster—which are already ongoing in the case of Matthew—often generate callous, clinical results that don’t capture the length and breadth of those effects; they may focus on how displacement might benefit one candidate or the other, but can’t capture the human stories behind those missed votes. The most difficult exercise in a catastrophe’s aftermath is accounting for the things and people lost: the resulting health crises, the activities made difficult, the memories erased, and the strain of rebuilding. Worrying about political consequences can seem crass when people’s day-to-day lives are in ruins. Sometimes, though, the things victims have to lose are political in nature, making a discussion about politics unavoidable—and even necessary.

National: Unable to Vote, Ex-Convicts Reach Out, Try to Have Impact on US Election | VoA News

Kenneth Inniss, 56, has not voted in a U.S. election since 1984, when he first went to prison for a felony conviction. He is now out but will have to wait one more year until he is off parole to vote. “It’s a right that we take for granted until it’s taken from us,” he said. “And that’s when it really hit home for me. I don’t have a say in how those laws are keeping me incarcerated.” Inniss recently packed into a glossy black van with eight other formerly incarcerated New Yorkers and embarked on a road trip to Cleveland, Ohio. The group had a simple mission: Inform Ohio ex-prisoners of their right to vote.