The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 1-7 2017
The news is dominated by the“massive, co-ordinated hacking” of the campaign of French Presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron. Minutes before the official end of campaigning, the Macron campaign said in a statement that it had been the victim of a major hacking operation that saw thousands of emails and other internal communications dumped into the public domain. The Atlantic noted that the attack drew immediate parallels to the cyberattacks that hit Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign last year, as well as to alleged electoral interference in other parts of Europe. It is likely that the leak, actively publicized by Wikileaks, far right activists and on the social media site 4chan, includes fake or modified documents along with genuine emails and documents. Further reporting here, here, here, and here.
During a public hearing Wednesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey predicted that if left undeterred, Russian hackers will one day attempt to change the vote tally in an American election. While there is no evidence to suggest that Russian hackers were able to alter vote counts in the 2016 election, some election officials fear that enemies of the US will attempt to disrupt future elections in more a direct manner. The vulnerability of electronic voting equipment used is the US is well documented.
Speaking on a panel at Harvard University, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers agreed at a panel at Harvard University that Russia likely believed it had achieved its goals and could attempt to repeat its performance in elections in other countries. “Their purpose was to sew discontent and mistrust in our elections they wanted us to be at each others’ throat when it was over,” Rogers said at the panel at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It’s influencing, I would say, legislative process today. That’s wildly successful.” As the Washington Post observed, “By now it should be clear that the new normal of Russian conduct on the international stage includes tampering with elections in Western democracies to boost candidates the Kremlin believes likely to do its bidding and to harass those who won’t.”
Incoming Maricopa County Arizona Recorder Adrian Fontes claims that as many as 58,000 voters may have been left off the rolls last November because they failed to provide proof of citizenship with their registration forms. Fontes said that he had discovered up to 100,000 state-issued voter-registration forms that employees had filed for more than a decade without saving the information in the voter database. Staffers explained that the applicants had failed to provide proof of citizenship. Proposition 200 passed by Arizona voters in 2004 requires aspiring voters to submit a passport, birth certificate, naturalization number, tribal membership or driver’s license obtained after 1996 to participate in elections.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered Georgia to temporarily reopen voter registration ahead of a hotly contested congressional runoff in the 6th District. A suit filed by The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on behalf of five civil rights and voting rights organizations, claimed that Georgia law cuts off voter registration for federal runoff elections two months earlier than allowed according to federal law.
The Illinois Board of Elections says that last August hackers gained access to the information of 80,000 Illinois voters — including their social security numbers and driver’s licenses. Speaking at a hearing of a state Senate subcommittee on cybersecurity, IT staff said hackers had access to Illinois’ system for nearly three weeks before they were detected. The hackers amassed records by searching by local voter identification numbers, systematically searching nine-digit codes starting from “000000001” and incrementally adding one.
A report released by legislative auditors Friday says the Maryland State Board of Elections needlessly exposed the full Social Security numbers of almost 600,000 voters to potential hacking, risking theft of those voters’ identities. The Baltimore Sun quoted Johns Hopkins computer scientist Avi Rubin, “This report tells me that the [elections board] is way behind the high-tech industry in maintaining the availability and security of their information.” Rubin said the board “needs to get its act together and catch up with best practices in the industry.”
Nevada, the first state to implement direct recording electronic voting machines equipped with voter verified paper trail printers, is planning to replace those machines for the 2018 elections. Two vendors – Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software – were invited to demonstrate their current equipment at in a daylong open house at the State Capitol.
A conflict between Utah lawmakers and Governor Gary Herbert over how to handle a potential special election to fill a congressional vacancy has sparked a proposal to limit the governor’s power to call special sessions of the Legislature. House Majority Leader Brad Wilson said he plans to propose an amendment to the Utah Constitution that would take away at least some of the governor’s control over special sessions. If passed by at least two-thirds of the Legislature, it would go before voters in November 2018.
The Indian Election Commission will convene a meeting next week with all seven national parties and 48 recognized state parties to discuss issues related to electronic voting machines (EVMs) and voter-verfied paper audit trail and to seek suggestions regarding its upcoming electronic voting machine “hackathon” challenge. The challenge is intended “to give the political parties a fair chance to put the EVMs to test and prove their tamperability,” according to a senior commission officer.
In a move similar to one his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez used almost 20 years ago, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro called for a constitutional assembly. Maduro has faced with daily protests for weeks and critics say he is calling the assembly precisely to avoid or delay free elections.