National: State officials bristle as researchers — and kids — at Def Con simulate election hacks | The Washington Post

For the second year in a row, hackers at the Def Con computer security conference in Las Vegas set out to show just how vulnerable U.S. elections are to digital attacks. At one gathering geared for kids under 17, elementary school-aged hackers cracked into replicas of state election websites with apparent ease. At the Def Con Voting Village, a section of the conference that showcased hands-on hacks, security researchers picked apart voting machines and exposed new flaws that could potentially upend a race. And hackers got close to being able to manipulate a heavily-guarded mock voter registration database. But during the weekend-long hack-a-thon, these faux election hackers had a hard time winning over some of the people they wanted to reach most.

National: Why US elections remain ‘dangerously vulnerable’ to cyber-attacks | The Guardian

Sixteen months ago, Marilyn Marks was just another political junkie watching a high-profile congressional election on her laptop when she saw something she found abnormal and alarming. The date was 18 April 2017, and the election was in Georgia’s sixth congressional district, where the Democrats were hoping to pull off an upset victory against a crowded Republican field in the wake of Tom Price’s (short-lived) elevation to the Trump cabinet as health and human services secretary. By mid-evening, Jon Ossoff, the leading Democrat, had 50.3% of the vote, enough to win outright without the need for a run-off against his closest Republican challenger. Then Marks noticed that the number of precincts reporting in Fulton County, encompassing the heart of Atlanta, was going down instead of up. Soon after, the computers crashed. Election officials later blamed a “rare error” with a memory card that didn’t properly upload its vote tallies. When the count resumed more than an hour later, Ossoff was suddenly down to 48.6% and ended up at 48.1%. (He lost in the run-off to Republican Karen Handel.)

National: DEF CON’s Voting Village tests hacker-government collaboration | CyberScoop

The national conversation on election security came into sharp focus Friday at a renowned hacker conference as U.S. officials and security researchers sought common ground in raising awareness of potential vulnerabilities in election equipment. The goal was to have a more transparent conversation about those vulnerabilities without spreading undue public fear about them. The Voting Village at DEF CON in Las Vegas, a room where white-hat hackers could tinker with voting machines and mock voter registration databases, was a high-profile test of that collaboration. “I’m here to learn,” Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, said before touring the village in the bowels of Caesars Palace hotel and casino. …  At the village, Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, stood next to a large ballot-scanner made by Election Systems & Software, one of the country’s biggest voting-equipment vendors. A couple of young researchers were picking the machine apart looking for vulnerabilities and what voting data the old machine might reveal.

National: Pre-Teen Hackers Prove It: The U.S. Election System Simply Isn’t Secure Enough | Futurism

Young kids vs. Dumb Machines: Still not convinced that the U.S. election system is woefully insecure? Chew on this: It took an 11-year-old just 10 minutes to hack a replica of the Florida secretary of state’s website and change its stored election results. The young hacker, Audrey Jones, was one of 39 children between the ages of 8 and 17 to take part in a competition organized by R00tz Asylum, a nonprofit focused on teaching kids white-hat hacking, during annual hacking conference DEFCON. During the one-day R00tz Asylum event, the children set out to infiltrate sites designed to replicate the ones used by 13 battleground states to convey election results to the public (hacking the actual sites would be illegal). All but four of the children succeeded.

National: 4 House Intel members offer election security bill | FCW

A Senate proposal to secure the U.S. election system has a companion bill in the House and a prominent Republican co-sponsor. A bipartisan group of four lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee have introduced a House version of the Secure Elections Act, which would authorize block grants for states to upgrade voting machines and other equipment, allow the Department of Homeland Security to more quickly share election cybersecurity threat information with state and local governments and streamline the security clearance process for state and local election officials.

Florida: Reports of election site hacking rankle Florida officials | Associated Press

Child’s play or a signs of a serious security problem in one of the nation’s swing states? That’s the question confronting Florida election officials who are pushing back against reports that an 11-year-old hacked a replica of the state’s election website. Multiple media outlets over the weekend reported that children at a hacking conference in Las Vegas were able to easily hack into a version of the website that reports election results to the public. An 11-year-old boy got into Florida’s site within 10 minutes, while an 11-year-old girl did it in 15 minutes, according to the organizers of the event called DEFCON Voting Machine Hacking Village. …  Florida’s election website that displays results is not connected to the actual local election systems responsible for tabulating votes. Instead, on election night supervisors upload unofficial results to state officials through a completely different network.

Voting Blogs: Federal Court Expedites Motion to Compel Georgia to Use Paper Ballots for 2018 Midterm Elections | The Brad Blog

Plaintiffs in a Georgia lawsuit seeking to force the state to move to a hand-marked paper ballot system in time for this year’s midterm elections, promise to produce expert testimony to the court, demonstrating that “Georgia’s voting system is a catastrophically open invitation to malicious actors intent on disrupting our democracy.” The Coalition for Good Governanceand a group of multi-partisan individual plaintiffs filed a motion [PDF]  on July 31, seeking a preliminary injunction in the federal case, to prevent Georgia from conducting this year’s midterms on the state’s notorious Diebold AccuVote TS (touchscreen) Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines. Instead, plaintiffs seek an order that Georgia’s election officials utilize, for in-person voting, the same already-certified, Diebold paper ballot-based optical-scan system currently used for tabulation of the Peach State’s absentee ballots.

Kansas: Johnson County accepts nearly 1,500 new election ballots | The Wichita Eagle

Gov. Jeff Colyer’s campaign staff left Monday morning’s canvassing meeting in Johnson County with the belief that the state’s most populous county would be counting all unaffiliated voters who cast ballots in the primary for governor. But it appears that Johnson County Election Commissioner Ronnie Metsker misspoke on the issue Monday morning, leading to confusion for the Colyer campaign and others about which ballots will be counted when Johnson County does its final vote tally Tuesday. Metsker referred to questions about the status of unaffiliated voters who were wrongly told to cast provisional ballots at their polling places and said 57 unaffiliated voters in Johnson County who were incorrectly told to cast provisional ballots would have their votes counted.

Michigan: State to appeal judge’s decision on straight-ticket voting ban | The Detroit News

The state will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that permanently barred Michigan from enforcing a straight-ticket voting ban. Secretary of State Ruth Johnson filed a notice of appeal Monday morning, nearly two weeks after Detroit U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain said the state’s GOP-led legislature “intentionally discriminated against African Americans” by banning straight-ticket voting. The state will be filing an emergency motion for stay alongside the appeal, Secretary of State spokesman Fred Woodhams said. “The state is confident that it will succeed on the merits of the appeal as there is no Fourteenth Amendment violation, no violation of the Voting Rights Act and plaintiffs lack standing to bring this claim,” he said in an email. 

North Carolina: Republican legislators violated a candidate’s constitutional rights, judge rules | News & Observer

A judge threw out a new state law Monday, ruling that it violated the constitutional rights of at least two politicians whose 2018 campaigns the law had targeted. Chris Anglin, a Republican candidate for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, had sued the legislature along with Rebecca Edwards, a Democrat who is running to become a district court judge in Wake County. Earlier this summer, the legislature passed a new law that would have prevented Anglin or Edwards from being able to have their party affiliations on the ballot. They argued that the law unfairly targeted them because their competitors in this November’s elections would still have their own parties listed on the ballot. Anglin, who is believed to have been the main target of the new law, is one of two Republicans running for the Supreme Court seat against a single Democratic candidate.

Ohio: Counties Consider Move from Electronic to Paper Voting Systems | Government Technology

A new generation of voting machines may soon be on the way thanks to a bill signed by Gov. John Kasich, which will allow $114.5 million to be distributed among Ohio’s 88 counties. “New” generation, however, may mean taking a step back in time. Voters in 41 counties, including Butler, Montgomery and Greene, have been using direct-recording electronic voting machines, or DREs, which requires the use of a touchscreen. But now, more counties are considering using paper ballots, as no DRE machine is currently certified for use in Ohio. That leaves many counties looking at a switch to paper ballots and optical-scanning equipment to count ballots, or hybrid systems coming at more than twice the price that employ touchscreens to mark a paper ballot. “I know people think that’s going backwards,” Butler County Board of Elections Director Diane Noonan said. “But you have to look at these machines and understand that paper is not what they think it is.” Warren, Preble and Clark counties already use paper ballots.

Verified Voting in the News: Voting by Smartphone: Quick and Easy, Just Not Very Secure | Der Spiegel

A small number of Americans will be able to vote in the midterm elections this November by taking a selfie-style video and downloading an app. West Virginia is the first and only state to test out Voatz, a voting app for smartphones. The experiment, which is largely directed at military personnel serving overseas, will allow the soldiers to cast their votes digitally as an alternative to cumbersome absentee ballots. … Ultimately, no one can say with certainty whether Voatz’s app is secure. Nimit Sawhney’s startup launched the software several years ago, and it went on to win a number of awards. But there is very little proof that it is invulnerable.

To start with, the infrastructure that Voatz uses cannot be secured — i.e., the voters’ smartphones and the networks used to transfer the data. Marian K. Schneider, president of the U.S. advocacy group Verified Voting, lobbies to make voting in the digital era transparent and secure. She has profound reservations about smartphone voting: “Even putting aside the authentication and verifiability issues, nothing in these systems prevents malware on smartphones, interception in transit or hacking at the recipient server end.” She also thinks it wouldn’t be too difficult to tamper with the identity authentication process. And even a targeted interruption of the connection could be enough to influence an election.

Wisconsin: Voters Worry About Ballot Security, Officials Say All’s Well | WUWM

Tuesday is primary election day in Wisconsin. With races for governor, U.S. Senate and other offices, turnout is expected to be the highest since the presidential election in November 2016. Donald Trump’s win in that election spurred a lot of national concern over election tampering. While some voters still aren’t sure the system is secure, Wisconsin officials say the public shouldn’t be worried about ballot security. After early voting last week at the Zeidler Municipal Building in downtown Milwaukee, Anthony Brown said he considers hacking of voting machines a legitimate threat. “Anything that somebody can access from the other side of the world — I mean anywhere — any computer-oriented person can dictate what’s going on inside of that machine,” Brown said.

Cambodia: How the Cambodian Government Is Trying to Chill the Push for Fair Elections | Pacific Standard

Cambodia’s ruling party declared victory following the July 29th national election. Headed by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has ruled the country for more than three decades, the Cambodian People’s Party announced that it will now hold all 125 seats in the country’s national assembly. That the CPP would win handily was a foregone conclusion. The ruling party’s only real competition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, had been dissolved last November, while its leader, Kem Sokha, was imprisoned on flimsily concocted “treason” charges. To top that off, in the months leading up to the vote, the government executed an unprecedented crackdown on independent media and civil society groups, severely restricting the space for free expression and competition.

Maldives: Election day declared a public holiday | Avas

Maldives government has declared September 23 a public holiday to allow people to vote in the presidential elections slated for that day. President’s Office spokesperson Ibrahim Muaz Ali in a Tweet said incumbent president Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom had declared Sunday, September 23 a public holiday to allow people to vote without work related commitments. The decision came after the country’s top court rejected a motion to declare elections day a public holiday.

Mali: Opposition candidate rejects presidential election results | Deutsche Welle

Malian opposition candidate Soumaila Cisse said Monday that he would reject the results of a presidential runoff against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, which has been marred with accusations of fraud. Ballot counting is underway in the western African country after Sunday’s second round vote. The results are not expected until midweek at the earliest, but Keita is predicted to confirm a second term in office.  Cisse, 68, has accused the government camp of electoral fraud, including vote buying and ballot-box stuffing.

Pakistan: Experts oppose online voting for overseas Pakistanis | The Express Tribune

The task force on voting rights of overseas Pakistanis in its report pointed out various shortcomings in the proposed system of internet-based voting, reducing the chances of its use in the near future. The report of the task force, constituted in April this year, was made public on Monday. It said online voting systems, even in the developed world, catered to relatively small number of voters – a mere 70,090 online votes were cast in the Norwegian elections in 2013, 176,491 in the 2015 elections in Estonia, and around 280,000 votes in the state election in New South Wales, Australia. It also said that leading international cybersecurity professionals have repeatedly voiced serious concerns regarding the security of internet voting.
“Researchers discovered vulnerabilities and launched devastating attacks on such systems (including those deployed in the US, Estonia, and Australia) that impacted tens of thousands of votes,” the report pointed out. Such demonstrations have played a determining role in discouraging deployment of internet voting in several developed countries.

Rwanda: Police ask public to stay calm, vigilant during election season | The New Times

Rwandans need to take extra precautions during the on-going parliamentary election period to ensure that the campaigns and subsequent polls are conducted in an environment that is free and secure. The message was delivered yesterday by the Rwanda National Police spokesperson, Commissioner of Police Theos Badege, in an exclusive interview with The New Times. Badege warned against too much excitement during the election season that may lead to some people forgetting to respect traffic rules and uphold security measures designed to ensure that people are safe at campaign rallies. “We need crime-free elections. We want to conduct elections in a free and secure environment,” he said, urging Rwandans to remain sensitive to security matters during the campaign and elections. Among the things to be avoided by citizens, the officer said, is to overload cars with supporters during the campaign process and trying to transport people in cars that are not meant for passenger transportation such as trucks.