Media Release: Security Experts Call on ES&S to Provide States with Steps to Disable Problematic Software Installed on Voting Machines

Marian K. Schneider: “Verified Voting calls on all the voting system vendors to be full partners in the effort to secure our elections.” The following is a statement from Marian K. Schneider, president of Verified Voting, following news that ES&S, the country’s top voting-machine maker, admitted installing problematic remote-access software on election-management systems that it…

National: ES&S Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States | Motherboard

The nation’s top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them. In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had “provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,” which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them. The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. “None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software,” the spokesperson said.

National: ES&S Admits Installing Remote-Access Software on State Voting Systems | ExtremeTech

In February 2018, Election Systems and Software told the press that it had never installed remote-access software in any of the e-voting systems it has sold in the various US states or to local governments. In April, the company told Senator Ron Wyden’s office (D-OR), that it had sold pcAnywhere remote connection software “to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006.” The good news about this disclosure is that the systems in question have all been retired and are no longer in use across the United States. But the fact that this happened in the first place, combined with ongoing warnings about the generally poor state of e-voting security, speaks to the depth and breadth of the issues facing the United States’ e-voting system as the 2018 midterm election approaches. The fact that ES&S lied about its own previous behavior to the public until pressured by Senator Wyden’s office says little good about the civic responsibility these companies feel towards ensuring that voting is handled safely. It’s important — just not as important as minimizing any hint of corporate liability.

National: The Biggest Spender of Political Ads on Facebook? President Trump | The New York Times

It’s official: President Trump is the single biggest political advertiser on Facebook. Mr. Trump and his political action committee spent $274,000 on ads on the social network since early May, outpacing the second-biggest spender, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care. Planned Parenthood spent just over $188,000 on Facebook ads over the same period. The ads bought by Mr. Trump and his PAC were also seen the most by Facebook’s users, having been viewed by at least 37 million people since May. That compared with 24 million people who saw the second-most viewed group of political ads, which were also from Planned Parenthood.

National: NSA and Cyber Command to coordinate actions to counter Russian election interference in 2018 amid absence of White House guidance | The Washington Post

The head of the nation’s largest electronic spy agency and the military’s cyberwarfare arm has directed the two organizations to coordinate actions to counter potential Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections. The move, announced to staff at the National Security Agency last week by NSA Director Paul Nakasone, is an attempt to maximize the efforts of the two groups and comes as President Trump in Helsinki on Monday said Russian President Vladi­mir Putin was “extremely strong and powerful” in denying Russian involvement in the presidential election two years ago. It is the latest initiative by national security agencies to push back against Russian aggression in the absence of direct guidance from the White House on the issue.

National: Trump says he accepts Russia meddled in election, but still muddies waters | The Guardian

Donald Trump sought to reverse course on Tuesday, after top Republicans scrambled to distance themselves from his behavior in his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Even then, Trump could not resist muddying the waters further. Speaking to reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, the president stated that he accepted the assessment of US intelligence agencies that Russiainterfered in the 2016 US election – and then, moments later, cast doubt on who was responsible. “Let me be totally clear in saying that … I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place,” Trump said, reading from a prepared script. He then added: “It could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.” On Monday, Trump met Putin with only interpreters in attendance for two hours then held a press briefing in which he sided with the Kremlin and against US intelligence services.

National: Indicted Russian firm says it was backing free political speech, not disrupting 2016 election | The Washington Post

A Russian company accused of bankrolling a massive online operation to disrupt the 2016 presidential election argued Monday that it had broken no federal laws, that it was merely supporting free political speech and that the fraud charge against it should be thrown out. Concord Management and Consulting was one of 16 Russian individuals or companies indicted by a federal grand jury in February at the behest of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The company is accused of defrauding the government by failing to register as foreign agents and failing to report its election-related expenditures to the U.S. government.

National: Tribal leaders tell Senate voting barriers are persistent, systemic | Cronkite News

Native Americans have been “systematically denied access to fair representation” as a result of persistent barriers to voting, advocates and tribal leaders told a Senate roundtable Tuesday. Witnesses told the informal meeting of senators from the Indian Affairs and Rules committees that tribal voters face a range of challenges, from language barriers, to restrictions with mail-in ballots and lack of access to voting locations. Many of those issues are rooted in “blatant discrimination,” one speaker said. “We should not have to talk about blatant discrimination,” said Jackson Brossy, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Washington Office. “Here we are in 2018. We still face many, many unacceptable barriers to voting for Navajo people.”

Alabama: Democratic Rep. John Knight handed GOP ballot, says voter list wrong | AL.com

State Rep. John Knight, D-Montgomery, got a surprise when he went to vote in the Democratic runoff at Alabama State University today. Knight, who is in a runoff with Sen. David Burkette for the Democratic nomination in Senate District 26, was told he could not vote in the Democratic runoff because he had voted in the Republican primary on June 5. “Which is crazy,” Knight said. “I was a candidate.” Knight said the chief inspector at the ASU polling place said other voters had experienced the same mixup.

Arizona: Prosecutors say Russian hackers leased servers in Arizona, Illinois | Associated Press

Exactly seven months before the 2016 presidential election, Russian government hackers made it onto a Democratic committee’s network. One of their carefully crafted fraudulent emails had hit pay dirt, enticing an employee to click a link and enter her password. That breach of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was the first significant step in gaining access to the Democratic National Committee network. To steal politically sensitive information, prosecutors say, the hackers exploited some of the United States’ own computer infrastructure against it, using servers they leased in Arizona and Illinois. The details were included in an indictment released Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller, who accused the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, of taking part in a wide-ranging conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The companies operating the servers were not identified in the court papers.

Illinois: Hacked Voter Records in Illinois Soar to Half a Million | Government Technology

Last week, Department of Justice Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that a dozen Russians were indicted for hacking offenses tied to the 2016 presidential elections. In addition to the indictments, Rosenstein asserted that Russian intelligence officers stole information on approximately 500,000 voters from a hacked state election board website. Illinois previously disclosed that it notified 76,000 residents that they may have had their voter registration data viewed by the attackers. And although the Illinois State Board of Elections is not specifically mentioned in Rosenstein’s speech nor in the grand jury indictment issued by the DOJ, the Illinois State Board of Elections believes the reference relates to it.  “As far as we know, we are the only state that experienced an actual breach, which is why we stated that we believe we are the ‘SBOE 1’ referred to in Count 11, paragraph 72 [of the indictment],” Matt Dietrich, public information officer for the Illinois State Board of Elections, told Government Technology.

Michigan: Republican Attorney General set to fight redistricting proposal at Michigan Supreme Court | The Detroit News

Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office will argue against a proposal for an independent redistricting commission Wednesday and ask the Michigan Supreme Court to keep the measure off the November ballot. The state’s highest court on Monday granted Schuette’s request for Solicitor General Aaron Lindstrom to participate in the high-stakes arguments over the Voters Not Politicians proposal. Lindstrom will get to use five minutes of the 30-minute bloc that had been reserved for attorneys from Citizens Protecting Michigan’s Constitution, the opposition group that first asked the Supreme Court to kill the initiative that would redefine the way political boundaries are drawn in the state.

Minnesota: Legal dispute over Minnesota voting records will head to higher court | KARE

A legal battle over Minnesota voting records will head to higher court. Ramsey County District Judge Jennifer Frisch, who previously ordered Secretary of State Steve Simon to turn over the voter records to a nonprofit political group, agreed to stay her own ruling to give Simon a chance to appeal it. The Minnesota Voters Alliance asked for the voting records, in hopes of proving a theory that thousands of ineligible voters register on Election Day and then vote before their identity and eligibility is verified. If their eligibility is challenged after the fact, their vote has already counted.

New Hampshire: City, town election officials sued for secretly throwing out absentee ballots if signature didn’t ‘match’ | Union Leader

Mary Saucedo was surprised to learn in 2017 that the ballot she cast in the 2016 presidential election didn’t count. The 94-year-old Manchester woman, who spent her career working for the Department of Veterans Affairs, is legally blind and for the past 12 years has voted by absentee ballot with the help of her husband. Her 2016 ballot was tossed by Saucedo’s ward moderator, who concluded that the signature on the absentee ballot application did not match the signature on the affidavit filed with the completed ballot. On Monday, Saucedo and her husband, Gus, were in U.S. District Court in Concord as attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union argued the state law allowing for ballots to be discarded under such circumstances is unconstitutional.

US Virgin Islands: Voting machines under-perform on under-voting | Virgin Islands Daily News

Early voting will be slightly later today than anticipated. V.I. Elections Board Chairman Arturo Watlington Jr. said voting could not start until after noon today after testing the machines revealed an inconsistency in how the devices read the ballots. The machines were reading and reporting under-voting for the offices of governor and senator-at-large, but for the main legislative race, in which voters can choose up to seven senators, no under-voting was being reported. Under-voting is the process of selecting fewer candidates for some offices while selecting the maximum number in other races — for example, choosing three senators instead of seven, or voting for seven district senators and withholding a vote in the governor’s race.

Cambodia: Election commission calls campaign to boycott election a ‘crime’ | AFP

Cambodia’s election commission on Tuesday (Jul 17) described calls to boycott a controversial election on Jul 29 as a “crime” and said authorities were already pursuing charges against those who criticised the vote. Strongman leader Hun Sen is set to extend his 33-year grip on power in the upcoming election after supporting the dissolution of the main opposition group last year and turning up the heat on civil society and the media. In recent weeks, however, opposition figures – mostly those who left the country in the wake of a sweeping crackdown – have pushed back and called on voters to skip the poll in protest.

Mali: U.N. says killings of almost 300 Malians this year could undermine July 29 poll | Africanews

With less than two weeks to the presidential polls in Mali, the U.N. human rights office says killings of almost 300 Malian civilians in fighting between rival militias this year, could threaten the outcome of the election. Malians head to the polls on July 29 for a vote meant to draw a line under six years of political unrest, jihadist attacks and ethnic clashes. But the situation has degenerated in recent months and spilled over into neighbouring countries. Mali’s government has repeatedly said the polls, in which incumbent President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita is seeking re-election, will go ahead as planned, but the relentless violence threatens to significantly depress turnout.

United Kingdom: Vote Leave broke electoral law and British democracy is shaken | The Guardian

Vote Leave has been fined £61,000 after being found guilty of breaking electoral law during the Brexit campaign. Two people have been referred to the police. But with this initial investigation concluded, Britain faces a difficult period of soul searching over what to do about this evidence of extensive wrongdoing. A democracy is only as strong as the elections that set its course. If they can be bought or subverted, then confidence in democracy and the legitimacy of the governments it installs, seeps away. But astonishingly, the details that have been gradually revealed, of illegal activity by both the official Vote Leave and the unofficial Leave.EU campaigns in the run-up to the Brexit vote, appear to have no immediate consequences. Most British elections are guaranteed by law. If evidence of serious cheating is uncovered they can be scrutinised and overturned in an “election court”, overseen by high court judges.

Zimbabwe: Electoral Commision Chairperson Claims Their Website Was Cloned: Does That Statement Really Mean Anything? | Techzim

Priscilla Chigumba the chairperson of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commision has claimed that their website was cloned and it seems there has been a lot of confusion because of the statement. Chigumba was being interviewed at Capitalk FM when she was asked about the privacy concerns that come with a detailed voters’ roll being online and easily accessible. In response to the question “…and what of the voters’ roll published that has peoples private information, the one that’s available on the internet… That is a cyber-security breach on every level ”, Chigumba said:

That’s a cyber-security breach. They cloned our site and we are in the process of doing something about it and we should have that site taken down in… during the course of the next ( get’s cut by presenter asking “It’s not yet down?”) Uhmm as of 12 midday today it wasn’t yet down.