Cambodia: Security forces overstep neutrality rules in election campaign, rights group says | Reuters

Cambodia’s security forces are “actively campaigning” for the ruling party of Prime Minister Hun Sen ahead of a general election on July 29, in violation of a law requiring political neutrality, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday. Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia for 33 years, wants to ensure victory after two close elections in 2013 and 2017 with a crackdown on his critics, spurring many rights groups and the main opposition to call the vote a sham. He is widely expected to win the election after the Supreme Court dissolved the main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) last year, leaving no significant competitor for Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).

National: Here’s an early look at how states are spending federal election security cash | The Washington Post

Nearly four months have passed since Congress set aside $380 million for states to upgrade their election systems, and we’re just now seeing concrete details about how states plan to spend that money. California will immediately make more than $3 million available to county officials to help them protect voter rolls from cyberthreats and improve accessibility at polling places, according to figures provided to The Cybersecurity 202. And Hawaii will spend more than $400,000 ahead of the November midterms to upgrade computers, hire staff and conduct cybersecurity training, the secretary of state’s office says.  California and Hawaii are among 13 states that, as of Monday, have submitted their detailed plans to the Election Assistance Commission about how they intend to spend their share of the federal cash ahead of the July 16 deadline. Their plans offer an early indication that states are taking recommendations from federal officials and election security experts seriously as the midterms approach and intelligence officials warn of a new wave of election interference from the Russian government. 

National: Expert: Putin can hack our midterms | Yahoo News

Russian President Vladimir Putin is poised once again to meddle in an American election, and there’s little the U.S can do to stop him, an expert says. “The midterm is vulnerable to attack. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s too late — if Putin wants to attack our midterm, he will.” Barbara Simons, a former IBM researcher and the co-author of “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?” told Grant Burningham, host of the Yahoo News podcast “Bots & Ballots.” Having spent the last decade trying to warn politicians of the vulnerabilities of computerized voting systems, Simons, who received a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, says that states like Georgia, New Jersey, Delaware, Louisiana and South Carolina that have switched to paperless elections are especially ripe targets.

National: DEF CON Voting Village grows this year | POLITICO

Black Hat and DEF CON are just around the corner, and one of the biggest headlines from last year’s conferences was the Voting Village where hackers broke into voting machines en masse. This year’s Voting Village at DEF CON will be three times the size of last year’s event to accommodate the massive demand from 2017, event organizer Harri Hursti told Tim. But it wasn’t easy to get to that point: Hursti said voting machine vendors unhappy with the publicity about hacked equipment threw up hurdles that forced them to get creative, like visiting government auctions to buy equipment to probe.

Editorials: Kavanaugh’s Record Doesn’t Bode Well for Voting Rights | Ari Berman/Mother Jones

Donald Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, could determine how the court rules on cases that shape the future of voting rights in the United States. And if his track record is any indication, many Americans could be disenfranchised as a result. As a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, Kavanaugh voted in 2012 to uphold a South Carolina voter ID law that the Obama administration said would disenfranchise tens of thousands of minority citizens. The Justice Department blocked the law, which required government-issued photo identification to vote, in late 2011 for violating the Voting Rights Act. “The absolute number of minority citizens whose exercise of the franchise could be adversely affected by the proposed requirements runs into the tens of thousands,” wrote Tom Perez, who was then assistant attorney general for civil rights and now leads the Democratic National Committee. The Justice Department found that more than 80,000 minority registered voters in South Carolina did not have DMV-issued identification, with African Americans 20 percent more likely than whites to lack such ID.

Florida: Local Election Supervisors Feeling The Squeeze Of Deadlines For Federal Cybersecurity Funding | WJCT

Florida’s election supervisors are feeling the squeeze of a short deadline to submit an application for $19 million in federal cybersecurity funding. The applications are due to the Department of State by next Wednesday. Leon County’s supervisor Mark Earley remembers the 2004 rush to buy electronic voting machines – which have mostly been phased out. He says this time around the scenario is different. Earley believes threats to cybersecurity are “very real.” But, he sees some similarities in the way spending is being rushed along. “The rush to spend the money back then caused some poor decisions,” Earley said. “We are somewhat faced with a rush to spend the money currently.” And, Earley says, if the money isn’t fully spent by the general election, it’s not clear if it will be available going forward.

Georgia: State seeks federal grant to upgrade election system | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia election officials are taking steps to secure a $10.3 million federal grant to upgrade the state’s voting system. Georgia Elections Director Chris Harvey sent a letter to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Tuesday requesting the grant to “improve the administration of elections for federal office, including to enhance election technology and make election security improvements.” The request comes after an announcement this spring from the independent federal agency that it planned to award Georgia the grant. The grant calls for $515,000 in matching funds from the state. Georgia’s total budget for administering elections in fiscal 2019 is about $5.8 million.

Kansas: With Elections Looming, ACLU Scrambles To Check If Kobach Registered Voters | KMUW

With less than a month until the 2018 primaries, the question of whether Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is in compliance with a federal court order to fix its voter registration practices is still up for debate. Kansas can no longer ask would-be voters to dig up documents like passports or birth certificates after a court ruled that unconstitutional and in violation of federal election law last month. Judge Julie Robinson ordered Kobach’s office to make sure that tens of thousands of previously blocked voters are now on the active voter rolls.

South Carolina: State’s 13,000 voting machines unreliable, vulnerable to hackers, lawsuit alleges | The State

Your right to vote is threatened in South Carolina. That’s the message of a lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Columbia against the S.C. Election Commission, its members and Marci Andino, the commission’s executive director. South Carolina’s thousands of digital voting machines are antiquated, break down, leave no paper trail of votes that can be audited, and have “deep security flaws” that make them vulnerable to hacking by Russians and others, the 45-page lawsuit alleges. “By failing to provide S.C. voters with a system that can record their votes reliably,” the Election Commission has deprived South Carolinians of their constitutional right to vote, the lawsuit says.

Texas: Legal political maps — except for those minority voters in Fort Worth | The Texas Tribune

In the eyes of the federal courts, it probably doesn’t matter — for electoral purposes — that the political lines in Fort Worth’s 90th Texas House District are discriminatory. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled almost entirely in favor of the state of Texas in a challenge to the political maps drawn for congressional and state House seats, with one exception, saying HD-90 is the one district where racial discrimination via redistricting crossed the legal lines. They sent the case back to lower federal judges for whatever nips and tucks their ruling requires. In turn, that lower court — three judges working out of San Antonio — last week asked the horde of redistricting lawyers to say by next month how each would make repairs.

Australia: Political parties to get cyber subsidy for electoral databases | iTnews

Australia’s four major political parties have been granted $300,000 to shore-up their systems following Russia’s alleged cyber interference in the 2016 US election. The funding will be made available to the parties in the form of voter information protection grants that will be administered by the Department of Finance over the second half of 2018. The Liberal, Nationals, Labor and Greens parties will use the grants to “improve security of their constituent management systems and associated data, including information pertaining to the electoral rolls and voter information”. The funding follows a series of briefings on the security threat to Australia’s elections between Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and party leaders in early 2017.

Cambodia: China Accused of Hacking Cambodian Government Institutions | VoA News

Cyberattackers have been caught hacking key Cambodian government institutions in what is strongly believed to be a coordinated Chinese government attack ahead of elections set for this month, a U.S. cybersecurity firm has alleged. Cambodia’s National Election Committee, Senate, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Interior, and Ministry of Economy and Finance have all been breached, along with computer systems of foreign diplomats, media institutions and opposition figures, an investigation by FireEye Inc. concluded. “We expect this activity to provide the Chinese government with widespread visibility into Cambodian elections and government operations,” the firm said in a report issued Tuesday. “Additionally, this group is clearly able to run several large-scale intrusions concurrently across a wide range of victim types.”

Mali: Background to a critical election in an increasingly insecure country | Africanews

Malians are due to vote on July 29 in a presidential election that many hope will chart a way out of six years of political unrest and jihadist violence. Mali has been in turmoil since Tuareg rebels and loosely allied jihadists seized its desert north in 2012, prompting French forces to intervene to push them back the following year. Those groups have since regained a foothold in the north and centre, using the sparsely-populated Sahel as a launchpad for attacks across the region. Mali’s incumbent president Ibrahima Boubacar Keita, who took office in 2013, and opposition frontrunner Soumaila Cisse are expected to be the two main candidates in the July 29 polls out of a field of 24 hopefuls.

Pakistan: More than 370,000 troops to guard Pakistan election as army denies meddling | Telegraph

Pakistan’s military said it would deploy more than 370,000 troops to guard the general election later this month, but said it was not meddling in the democratic process. Major General Asif Ghafoor told a news conference that more than three times as many troops would be deployed than in the 2013 elections, and they would be stationed inside and outside polling stations. Campaigning has so far been dominated by allegations the military has run a multi-pronged campaign to undermine the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) party of ousted former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, and muzzled the media. Sharif, who last week was sentenced to 10 years for corruption offences, says the army is trying tip the balance in favour of Imran Khan’s PTI party.

United Kingdom: Facebook to be fined £500,000 in Cambridge Analytica data scandal | Politico

It’s more bad news for Facebook. The social networking giant faces a fine of a half a million pounds in Britain for failing to protect people’s online data connected to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to a report published by the country’s privacy watchdog on Wednesday. The financial penalty would represent the first levy worldwide against the tech giant for its role in the alleged abuse. As part of an ongoing investigation into the use of data by political groups, Elizabeth Denham, the U.K.’s Information Commissioner, or ICO, said Facebook broke the country’s data protection rules by making users’ information available to a third-party app linked to Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm. Facebook also was not transparent about how people’s digital information would then be used by these companies, particularly in relation to political campaigns.

Zimbabwe: The Voters’ Roll Is Now Available Online And This Could Seriously Endanger Citizens | Techzim

ZANU-PF’s recent violation of privacy has been grabbing all the headlines. The political party sent out some unsolicited and scarily specific SMSs to some Econet subscribers. This has resulted in a lot of heated debate with people questioning where the party got these numbers and the specific constituency of subcribers. As we were taking a closer look at this situation we stumbled upon a website containing the voters’ roll for 30 July’s election. We downloaded the voters’ roll for the Harare Metropolitan and quickly we realised that the voters’ roll may be too detailed and this may leave citizens exposed to all kinds of risks for a long time.