Marian K. Schneider: “Verified Voting cannot in good conscience support the Secure Elections Act unless the previous audit language of the bill is restored” The following is a statement from Marian K. Schneider, president of Verified Voting, formerly Deputy Secretary for Elections and Administration in the Pennsylvania Department of State, regarding the Chairman’s mark of…
With the U.S. heading into a pivotal midterm election, little progress has been made on ensuring the integrity of voting systems—a concern that retook the spotlight when the 2016 presidential election ushered Donald Trump into the White House amid allegations of foreign interference. A raft of start-ups has been hawking what they see as a revolutionary solution: repurposing blockchains, best known as the digital transaction ledgers for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, to record votes. Backers say these internet-based systems would increase voter access to elections while improving tamper-resistance and public auditability. But experts in both cybersecurity and voting see blockchains as needlessly complicated, and no more secure than other online ballots. Existing voting systems do leave plenty of room for suspicion: Voter impersonation is theoretically possible (although investigations have repeatedly found negligible rates for this in the U.S.); mail-in votes can be altered or stolen; election officials might count inaccurately; and nearly every electronic voting machine has proved hackable. Not surprisingly, a Gallup poll published prior to the 2016 election found a third of Americans doubted votes would be tallied properly.
A majority of U.S. states has adopted technology that allows the federal government to see inside state computer systems managing voter data or voting devices in order to root out hackers. Two years after Russian hackers breached voter registration databases in Illinois and Arizona, most states have begun using the government-approved equipment, according to three sources with knowledge of the deployment. Voter registration databases are used to verify the identity of voters when they visit polling stations. The rapid adoption of the so-called Albert sensors, a $5,000 piece of hardware developed by the Center for Internet Security www.cisecurity.org, illustrates the broad concern shared by state government officials ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, government cybersecurity experts told Reuters.
In March, Hawaii Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard introduced the Securing America’s Elections Act to require the use of paper ballots as backup in case of alleged election hacking. Now voting advocates are suing Georgia to do the same thing. Some voting systems are so easy to hack a child can do it. Eleven year old Emmett Brewer hacked into a simulation of Florida’s state voting website in less than 10 minutes at the DefCon hacking conference last week in Las Vegas, according to Time. Of the approximately 50 children age 8 to 17 who took part in the Election Voting Hacking Village at DefCon, 30 were able to hack into imitation election websites within three hours, Time reported. The kids were able to rewrite vote tallies so that they totaled as much as 12 billion, and change the names of parties and candidates, according to the Guardian.
In November 2012, former North Dakota attorney general Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, won a hotly-contested race for a seat in the U.S. Senate, a win attributed to the state’s Native American voters. Shortly after that, lawmakers in the majority Republican state passed a tough voter-ID law, making it a lot harder for tribe members to vote. The nonprofit Native American Rights Fund (NARF) sees the new law as racially motivated and has taken North Dakota to court. This year, NARF conducted field hearings across Indian Country to hear testimony on voter suppression in other states. “And what we heard was really disturbing,” said NARF attorney Jacqueline D. De León, a member of the Isleta Pueblo in New Mexico.
U.S. state election officials are demanding better access to sometimes classified federal government information about hacking threats to voting systems. With less than three months until the November midterm elections, 44 states, the District of Columbia, and numerous counties on Wednesday participated in a simulation that tested the ability of state and federal officials to work together to stop data breaches, disinformation and other voting-related security issues. They did not simulate a cyber attack, but rather played out various scenarios to learn how to react if there were one. The Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, U.S. Cyber Command, Justice Department and the FBI participated.
Some election results from the Alaska primary could be delayed after more than 100,000 voters were given a month to clear up discrepancies with their addresses on voting records. Election officials have not given an exact count of how many did so, but those who didn’t may have to vote a questioned ballot in Tuesday’s primary election. That creates the potential for a delay in election results, especially in tight races, since election officials do not begin counting questioned ballots until a week after the election. “I think the problem is, we don’t know the breadth of the issue right now, so until we know the breadth of the issue, I don’t know that we know the questions to ask,” Stacey Stone, an attorney for the Alaska Republican Party, told The Associated Press. Josie Bahnke, the elections director, was too busy with the election to talk to a reporter, her spokeswoman said.
Civil rights organizations have asked a federal judge to order the state of Florida and local election officials to provide Spanish-language ballots, literature and translators for voters of Latino descent in time for the midterm election. In a lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, a coalition of nonpartisan groups argue that Florida’s secretary of state and local officials are violating the voting rights of Puerto Ricans, tens of thousands of whom moved to the state in the past year after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. The groups have spent months trying to work with local election officials in 32 counties to provide language services to Spanish-speaking residents.
Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Kemp says Georgia’s aging electronic voting machines should be replaced, coming around to a position critics say he’s resisted for eight years as the state’s top elections official. There’s just one thing – Kemp says it can’t be done in time for his own election this November. The secretary of state is asking companies for proposals to implement new machines that produce verifiable paper records in time for the next presidential election in 2020. Meanwhile, he’s dismissing experts who say the electronic machines are susceptible to hacking and that there’s no way to confirm the accuracy of their vote counts. Kemp is defending the system in place since 2002 as “accurate and secure” enough for this fall’s elections, even though it produces no paper backups that can be audited to make sure each voter’s choice is reflected in the tally.
As Georgians prepare to cast their ballots in a nationally watched gubernatorial race, the security and reliability of the state’s election system remains a point of concern for many voters and security experts. Polls show that a large percentage of Americans believe there’s a concerted effort underway by foreign entities to undermine American Democracy and promote discord, using everything from fake Facebook accounts to Russian Twitter bots. But perhaps nothing strikes fear in the hearts of voters in Georgia and across the country more than the notion that their ballots could be changed by hackers. In the metro area, elections officials in Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett, Henry, Clayton and Fayette counties told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution they are working with the Secretary of State’s office to ensure every ballot cast in November is counted and reported accurately. They say their systems and processes are battle tested and secure. Still, there’s a growing clamor for more precautions. The state’s weaknesses have been well documented. Georgia uses electronic voting machines and is one of only five states that don’t have paper backups that can be used to audit results.
Kansas lawmakers are vowing to take a fresh look at the state’s election laws after the slim margin between Kris Kobach and Jeff Colyer in the Republican race for governor exposed a sometimes creaky and subjective vote-counting system. Even before the fight over the results of last week’s election, a nationwide review of state election systems ranked Kansas below nearly every other state. Ballots improperly filled out, mail-in ballots without postmarks, even the vote of a person who later died – all landed in the laps of local election officials who made sometimes-conflicting decisions. Two of the largest counties —Johnson and Sedgwick — took different approaches to counting some ballots cast by unaffiliated voters. For some, the deciding factor over whether their vote counted was what county they live in.
A three-judge panel on Wednesday declined to throw out a gerrymandering lawsuit against Republican officials in Ohio, finding that a group of Democratic voters established legal standing to bring the challenge. In May, a coalition of Democratic voters and groups, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, sued Governor John Kasich and other Republican lawmakers in Cincinnati federal court. They urged the court to enjoin a 2011 redistricting statute that the GOP used to redraw maps, arguing it gave an unfair advantage to Republicans at the expense of Democratic voters. Republicans would win 12 congressional districts and Democrats four districts, even as the statewide share of the vote for each party shifted over three congressional elections between 2013 and 2016.
With the counting of outstanding ballots complete in both districts, V.I. Joint Board of Elections members convened Thursday to resolve several challenges filed by or against candidates running in the August Democratic primary. Nearly two hours was spent at the beginning of the meeting dealing with a recount petition filed by St. Croix Senate candidate Nemmy Jackson-Williams, whose concerns centered on irregularities experienced by voters using machines either during the early voting process or on primary election day. Specifically, two witnesses called by Jackson-Williams and her campaign manager Dale Brown said the voting machines they used didn’t accept their ballots the first time around, and once the ballots were accepted, the screens on the machines didn’t show the voters who they actually voted for.
Election turnouts around the world are often dismally poor; meanwhile, consumers are wedded to their smartphones and using them for new applications all the time. One obvious solution is to allow people to vote by phone. Two years ago, indeed, a Consumer Reports survey revealed that a third of Americans reckoned they’d be more likely to vote if they could do it on their phone. And now, following a pilot involving military voters earlier this year, West Virginia is planning to allow voters living overseas to cast their ballot via smartphone in the upcoming mid-term elections. The plan is to use a blockchain-based system from the company Voatz.
Around six million Pakistani citizens are residents of other countries and many of them are eligible to vote. With e-voting being trialled around the world the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) was tasked with finding an internet solution to their voting needs. It did so and duly submitted a proposal to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) which set up a task force to investigate the proposal and its viability — and it now stands rejected. The Internet Voting Task Force (IVTF) conducted a technical audit of the proposed i-Vote and found there were flaws, specifically risks to the transparent conduct of voting.
Polish President Andrzej Duda on Thursday said he would not sign a law put forward by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party that would have effectively meant that no small party in Poland would have a chance at European Parliament elections next year. “I’ve decided to veto this bill. This change would mean that the effective electoral threshold would rise to as much as 16.5 percent from 5 percent,” Duda said on public television.
The United States said it was concerned about accounts of violence and intimidation in the run-up to Aug. 12 by-elections in Tanzania. Tanzanian opposition leaders have complained that tolerance for dissent has diminished rapidly since President John Magufuli took office in 2015 on pledges to reform the East African nation’s economy and crack down on corruption. The U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam cited “credible” accounts of violence and irregularities ahead of the by-elections.
At a glance, Valeriy Striganov seems like an unremarkable Ukrainian civil servant. But he has a monumental mission: as head of the Central Election Commission’s (CEC) IT Department, Striganov is tasked with protecting the upcoming March 2019 presidential elections from a cyber attack. “We find malware every day,” Striganov said with a laugh, peering out from behind a Republic of Gamers-branded laptop that he bought for his job. The question for Ukraine’s cyber security professionals is not so much whether an attack on the election will take place — that is almost completely assured. Rather, it’s how such an offensive will take place.