New Zealand: Plans for online voting at local govt elections ‘dangerous’ | Radio New Zealand

An Australian IT expert says New Zealand would be crazy to adopt online voting for local government elections and would be opening itself up to widespread electoral fraud. Nine councils including Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton and Tauranga want to use it at next year’s elections, despite there being few examples overseas of where it is being used successfully or safely. Online voting was first used at government elections in Estonia in 2005. Its take up by the rest of the world since then has been limited at best, in large part due to vulnerabilities in its systems that allowed hackers to cast fake votes and rig elections. Australian IT expert Vanessa Teague alerted authorities to faults in the 2015 New South Wales state elections, where a quarter of a million voted online. There were plenty of hackers worldwide happy to take money from a vested interest looking to manipulate an election in their favour, she said.

Russia: Election in Russia’s Far East to be re-run after fraud scandal | Reuters

A regional election in Russia’s Far East will be re-run, the local election commission said on Thursday, dealing a rare blow to the Kremlin after allegations the vote had been rigged in its candidate’s favor. The ruling, in Russia’s Primorsky Region which includes the Pacific port of Vladivostok, 6,400 km (4,000 miles) east of Moscow, came a day after Russia’s top election official recommended that the election be re-run. Ella Pamfilova, head of the Central Election Commission, had not accused the Kremlin-backed candidate, Andrei Tarasenko, of orchestrating the vote-rigging, but had said that a raft of irregularities had been identified, including ballot stuffing and vote buying. 

Sweden: IT sector advises Swedish government on elections and voting system | Computer Weekly

Swedish IT sector is helping the government make election systems more secure and reduce external influence. The security measures assembled and implemented around the 2018 election in Sweden were devised in consultation with leading actors within Sweden’s private IT sector. The primary role of the IT suppliers was to advise government panels, which included the national security service (Säpo), the National Police Board (Rikspolisstyrelsen), the National Civil Contingencies Agency and the National Election Authority. Säpo was at the head of a government-commissioned election taskforce that organised an IT-based protective shield around the voting process and implemented measures to minimise hostile external inference.

National: The Cyberthreats That Most Worry Election Officials | Wall Street Journal

As Election Day gets closer, one issue looms large for voters and election officials alike: cybersecurity. Hoping to quell fears about foreign hackers and repel potential threats, many states and counties are beefing up their plans to deal with cyberattacks. They’re shoring up systems to protect their voter databases and hiring security experts to assess the strength of their defenses. They’re coordinating with social-media organizations to stamp out deliberately fraudulent messages that could mislead voters about how to cast a ballot. And they’re banding together to share information and simulating how to respond to potential emergencies. One simulation-based exercise, held by the Department of Homeland Security in mid-August, gathered officials from 44 states, the District of Columbia and multiple federal agencies, the DHS says. “There absolutely is more emphasis on contingency planning” since 2016, says J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. 

National: Election Equipment Vendors Play a Key, and Underexamined, Role in U.S. Democracy | Take Care

Every vote in the United States — for city council, state representative, or president — is cast using materials and equipment manufactured by third party vendors. There are vendors large and small, but the American election equipment industry is dominated by three vendors: ES&S, Hart, and Dominion. These vendors manufacture the machines that approximately 92% of eligible voters use on election day — and they wield extraordinary power with significant implications for our democracy. Because of this, it’s critical that elected officials and advocates pay attention to the role vendors play in the security and transparency of American election systems. Perhaps most concerning are vendor efforts to keep secret the technology upon which American elections rely while at the same time feteing state and local election officials with expensive trips and meals. Vendors have actively and increasingly pushed back on efforts to study and analyze the equipment that forms the basic foundation of our democratic processes.

National: Symantec takes on election hacking by fighting copycat websites | CNET

Symantec is offering a free tool for US campaigns and election officials to fight fraudulent websites, the company announced Tuesday. The feature could help take away an important weapon in the election hacking arsenal: the spoof website. Lookalike websites could imitate official government sites and report false information about candidates or voting. What’s more, they’ve already been used to imitate a login page to trick campaign workers to enter their valuable usernames and passwords.  That approach, called phishing, was key to letting hackers gain access to the emails and internal documents of important Democratic Party organizations and key figures in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to an indictment of the Russian hackers alleged to have stolen and leaked emails from the groups.

National: Is There Voter Suppression In 2018? Here’s What It Could Look Like In The Midterms | Bustlea

Voter suppression is a serious issue that takes many forms — but it’s a lot more subtle than you might think. When it comes to voter suppression in the midterms, you might not even know it’s happening, but you can bet that a bunch of (strategically placed) red tape will end up blocking some people from voting this year. Basically, any action taken with the goal of preventing or dissuading you from voting is voter suppression. You often hear about voter suppression in the context of policies that have made it harder for certain groups of people, or for people who live in certain areas, to cast their ballots. These barriers are bureaucratic for the most part. Voting rights advocates point to voter ID requirements, decreased early voting opportunities, polling station closures, voter roll purges, and gerrymandering as means of voter suppression. Voting rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are challenging most of these obstacles in court, but there’s still the possibility you could run into difficulties at the polls. Don’t panic, though. There are a few simple steps you can take to make sure you (and the people you know) don’t encounter any barriers to voting this year. Let’s walk through some of the hurdles that could prevent you from voting, and then we’ll talk about what you can do about them.

Georgia: This Judge Just Cast More Doubt on Elections Security Right Before Midterms | InsideSources

Right before midterms, a United States District Court judge found that Georgia’s electronic voting machines are extremely vulnerable to hacking and foreign meddling — including from Russia — but ruled against changing the state’s elections systems to avoid voter confusion and chaos. But by simply highlighting the vulnerability of Georgia’s electronic voting machines, the judge may have already undermined voter confidence just weeks before the midterms. The new ruling from Judge Amy Totenberg in Curling v. Kemp found that Georgia’s electronic voting machines are so easily hacked that it is irresponsible for a locality or state to use them without a paper audit trail. Georgia’s machines do not have paper audit trails. Totenberg admonished the state of Georgia for not properly addressing election security issues in time for the 2018 midterm elections, reminding them that “2020 elections are around the corner” and that “if a new balloting system is to be launched in Georgia in an effective manner, it should address democracy’s critical need for transparent, fair, accurate, and verifiable election processes that guarantee each citizen’s fundamental right to cast an accountable vote.”

Georgia: Judge: Georgia has stalled in face of voting system risks | Associated Press

As Georgia’s top elections official runs for governor, a federal judge said the state has stalled too long in the face of “a mounting tide of evidence of the inadequacy and security risks” of its voting system. Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, is in the midst of a closely watched race against Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state House minority leader who’s trying to become the country’s first black, female governor. He has repeatedly insisted that Georgia’s current voting system is secure. Voting integrity advocates sued last year, arguing that the touchscreen voting machines Georgia has used since 2002 are vulnerable to hacking and provide no way to confirm that votes have been recorded correctly because there’s no paper trail. They sought an immediate change to paper ballots for the midterm elections while the case is pending. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg declined to grant that request Monday, saying that although voting integrity advocates have demonstrated “the threat of real harms to their constitutional interests,” she worried about the “massive scrambling” required for a last-minute change to paper ballots. Early voting starts Oct. 15 for the Nov. 6 midterm elections.

Kansas: ACLU sues for Johnson County voters’ names whose ballots were rejected | The Kansas City Star

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing to get the names of Johnson County voters who cast provisional ballots in the August primary. The ACLU also wants a list of voters in the county who cast advance mail ballots that were rejected because their signature didn’t match their voter record. The lawsuit comes after a tumultuous Republican primary election for gov rnor that exposed sometimes-subjective vote counting. Some Kansas counties counted ballots that would have been tossed out in others in a race between Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Gov. Jeff Colyer that was decided by fewer than 350 votes. “We aren’t asking to see who they voted for or any private information,” said Lauren Bonds, the ACLU of Kansas’ legal director, in a statement. “That information should be afforded the utmost privacy. However, people should know whether their vote counted or if people faced any unnecessary barriers to voting. The public interest here is just transparency.”

Kentucky: Why is the Kentucky State Board of Elections in chaos? | Lexington Herald Leader

It’s 49 days until Election Day and the Kentucky State Board of Elections is mired in chaos. At issue is a power struggle between the staff of the State Board of Elections and Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes over control of Kentucky’s election system. Grimes, a Democrat, argues that her role as chairwoman of the board of elections requires her staff to have access to Kentucky’s voter registration database and oversight of the day-to-day operations of the State Board of Elections. Jared Dearing, executive director of the State Board of Elections, filed a complaint last month with the board, the executive branch ethics commission and the state personnel board, alleging Grimes had overstepped her authority by eliminating the independence of the board’s staff, asking her staffers to access the voter database, and creating a hostile work environment.

New Jersey: New mail-in ballot law could cause confusion at the polls | NJTV

County workers are stuffing envelopes with mail-in ballots, and they’re stuffing a lot of envelopes. Thanks to a new state law, every voter who got a mail-in ballot in 2016 will automatically get one this year, unless they opt out in writing. So where Monmouth County expected to send out up to 20,000 mail-in ballots, it will now have to send out more than 30,000. “That part of the law, that new change, has been difficult to implement in such a short time period because vote by mail ballots start going out Sept. 22. It’s not like we have until November to implement a law that was enacted in August. We basically had a month,” said Monmouth County Clerk Christine Giordano Hanlon. Gov. Phil Murphy signed the law in August, arguing that expanding mail-in voting, or what used to be known as an absentee ballot, would expand voter participation. County clerks, however, say they had just weeks to comply with the law, without additional resources to do so.

North Carolina: Florence complicates the election process. Will it keep people from voting? | News & Observer

Turnout may be tempered in the upcoming election after Hurricane Florence impaired North Carolina’s infrastructure, displaced thousands of voters and distracted from political issues as candidates jockey for favor. The deadly storm arrived just as door-knocking, campaign advertisements and fundraising started to ramp up. At stake this year are a state Supreme Court seat, congressional seats, six proposed constitutional amendments and control of North Carolina’s legislature, along with municipal races. Republicans control the legislature, and Democrats hope to gain influence by winning four House seats or six Senate seats to break the GOP supermajority. But Florence has thrown a wrench into the Republican and Democratic machines. It dumped record amounts of rain from the coast to the Piedmont, causing flooding that’s displaced countless residents and complicated the election preparation process.

Virginia: House GOP releases redistricting proposal it says is ‘race blind’; Democrats reject it as ’empty rhetoric’ | Richmond Times-Dispatch

Republican leaders in the Virginia House of Delegates unveiled their own redistricting plan Tuesday, saying their proposed map is “race blind” and would fix racial gerrymandering without giving either party a significant political advantage. The General Assembly has six weeks left to pass a new House electoral map after a federal court ruled over the summer that lawmakers unconstitutionally prioritized race during the 2011 redistricting process by drawing too many African-American voters into majority-minority districts. The 2011 map passed with bipartisan support. It remains to be seen whether the GOP-controlled legislature will pass a map before the Oct. 30 deadline set by the court. But the introduction of the Republican plan puts another option on the table ahead of a House elections committee meeting next week. The bill’s patron is Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle.

Wisconsin: Elections Commission hires new staff aimed at increasing elections security | WISC

With less than two months until the November election, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has hired several new staff members to help with election security. The federal government awarded the commission nearly $7 million in grants for election security. “We’re using a significant amount of that money on hiring new people, as well as for system enhancements for security,” said Reid Magney, public information officer for the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The elections commission will hold a meeting on Aug. 25 to ask clerks and members of the public how they should spend the rest of the grant money.

Bangladesh: National Economic Council approves USD 456 million project to procure electronic voting machines | Business Standard News

Bangladesh plans to buy 1.5 lakh electronic voting machines at a cost of nearly USD 456 million, the country’s top economic policy-making body announced Tuesday. The project was approved at the weekly Executive Committee of the National Economic Council (ECNEC) meeting here headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Briefing reporters after the meeting, Planning Minister A H M Mustafa Kamal said the Prime Minister had directed that the voting machines should initially be used in urban areas as the number of educated people in cities and towns is higher. “The EVMs will be used mainly in urban areas at first and will gradually be introduced in other areas,” he was quoted as saying by the ‘Dhaka Tribune’.

Canada: Elections Canada wants to buy social media ‘listening’ tool to track threats ahead of 2019 election | Globalnews.ca

Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. All three have been accused over the last two years of letting themselves be used by Russian attempts to influence the 2016 American election and as a new procurement posting suggests, they are just a few of the social media sites Elections Canada wants to keep an even closer eye on as it tracks risks and trends ahead of the 2019 Canadian election. To do that, the elections agency plans to buy what it calls a “social media and open source data listening and analytics tool.” In a notice of proposed procurement posted on Tuesday morning, the elections agency writes that it needs the new tool to be able to “listen, in near real time, to key influencers to identify potential issues that may affect the election early on,” as well as to “detect, through timely and accurate notifications, potential incidents and trends affecting the integrity of Canadian electoral events in near real time.”

Maldives: Tropical Maldives heads to polls amid criticism over fairness of vote | Reuters

More than a quarter of a million people will vote on Sunday for the next leader of the tropical Maldives in an election criticized internationally for a lack of transparency and suppression of government critics. President Abdulla Yameen is seeking a second five-year term in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a popular high-end tourist destination and a key state in the battle for influence between India and China. But the government has jailed many of his main rivals after speedy trials for charges ranging from terrorism to corruption, and introduced new vote-counting rules that observers say will prevent them from seeing individual ballot papers, leading to doubts about the legitimacy of the vote.

Pakistan: I-voting drive draws tepid response from overseas Pakistanis | Dawn

The campaign to register overseas Pakistanis for internet-voting in the upcoming by-polls evoked a lukewarm response, with only 7,419 expatriates out of the total 632,000 registering to avail the facility offered to them for the first time in the country’s electoral history. The process of registration of overseas Pakistanis from the 37 constituencies where by-elections are to be held on Oct 14 had started on Sept 1 and came to a close on Monday at 9am. According to a statement released by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), the website for the overseas voters remained functional 24/7 throughout the registration process and did not face any technical problems.

Russia: Candidate protests ‘rigged’ election with hunger strike | Euronews

Russian gubernatorial candidate Andrei Ishchenko, of the Communist Party, has ended his hunger strike in protest of election authorities of rigging the results in Sunday’s runoff vote for governor of the Primorye region, in the country’s Far East. The hunger strike was called off — at least for now — after officials said they would investigate the vote count. With 95% of the ballots counted, Ishchenko had a 5% lead over the candidate from a pro-Kremlin party. However, a few hours later election officials reported that after all the votes were counted, the Kremlin-backed incumbent Andrei Tarasenko had won.

Togo: Dates announced for referendum, legislative elections | Al Jazeera

Togo will hold legislative and local elections in December as well as a referendum on constitutional reform. “We will hold the local elections and the referendum on December 16, and on December 20 we will organise legislative elections,” national election commission chief Kodjona Kadanga said on Tuesday. “We are technically prepared. I can assure you that we have sufficient balloting material as well as people. There are no problems on our side.”  Kadanga did not specify what reforms were envisaged. Togo’s latest political crisis started in August 2017, when large numbers of people rallied against the administration of President Faure Gnassingbe. Mass anti-government rallies have repeatedly been held across the country since, with protesters demanding an end to the 50-year rule by the Gnassingbe family and constitutional reform, including a two-term limit for presidents.

Georgia: Judge upholds electronic voting machines | Atlanta Journal Constitution

A federal judge ruled Monday that Georgia can continue using electronic voting machines in November’s election despite concerns they could be hacked. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg denied a request for an injunction that would have forced the state’s 6.8 million voters to switch to hand-marked paper ballots. Totenberg made her decision in an ongoing lawsuit from voters and election integrity organizations who say Georgia’s direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are untrustworthy and insecure. Georgia is one of five states that relies entirely on electronic voting machines without a verifiable paper backup. Her 46-page order Monday said she was concerned about “voter frustration and disaffection from the voting process” if she had prohibited electronic voting machines just weeks before the election. “There is nothing like bureaucratic confusion and long lines to sour a citizen,” Totenberg wrote. 

National: Voting Machines: A Weak Link | EE Times

In my community, we vote by filling in circles on a paper sheet that goes into a scanner — we have a paper trail. Can such a process still be hacked? Yes, though paperless voting machines can more easily be hacked. Professors Ronald Rivest of MIT and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan explained on Sept. 13 in a session at EmTech MIT on how hackers can alter elections. According to Rivest, about 80% of voting jurisdictions in the U.S. have some sort of paper trail in the event of voting-machine hacks. If, however, you vote in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, or Nevada, there is no way to hand-count the votes should the need arise; votes are electronically recorded. The map below reveals that many other states use a mixture of paper and paperless voting systems. 

National: The Latest Casualty of States’ Rights: Your Vote | WhoWhatWhy

From racial segregation to environmental destruction to voter suppression, the concepts of “federalism” and “states’ rights” have a long-running association with some of the worst outcomes of American conservatism. And we may soon add “endangering American democracy” to that list. These political philosophies are being invoked to sink a key election-security bill — at a time when midterm elections are being actively probed and prodded for weaknesses by potentially hostile nation-states. The Secure Elections Act (SEA), which seemed poised to become a rare bipartisan slam-dunk, may not even make it to a vote now that the bill has been pulled from committee, reportedly under order of the Trump White House.

National: 5 states will vote without paper ballots; experts want that to change | ABC

When voters go to the polls in five states, a verified paper trail will not follow them. At a time of heightened concerns over election interference, election-security experts have called for that to change, suggesting paper results – visually confirmed by voters – would help state officials recover in the event of meddling or simple mistakes. “That presents a greater risk because there’s no way to detect if things have gone wrong,” said Marian Schneider, former deputy secretary of voting and administration in Pennsylvania and the president of the group Verified Voting. Paper ballots – or, at least, auditable paper trails, in which voters can see their choices recorded on a printed roll of paper – have been recommended by experts from Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program to the Defending Digital Democracy Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center. A large swath of Americans, however, will vote without them.

National: Lawsuit claims potential voters stuck in naturalization limbo | KABC

Advocates for immigrants and voting rights filed a federal lawsuit Monday demanding information from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. The groups believe that the Trump administration is engaged in deliberate foot-dragging to potentially slow new citizens from registering as Democrats. According to federal figures, 6.6 million people followed the process and became eligible to vote in the decade before 2012. Plaintiffs said the flow has since hit a roadblock. “They have at least doubled the amount of time it takes to become a citizen,” said Peter Schey, president of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

National: Facebook pilots new political campaign security tools — just 50 days before Election Day | TechCrunch

Facebook has rolled out a “pilot” program of new security tools for political campaigns — just weeks before millions of Americans go to the polls for the midterm elections. The social networking giant said it’s targeting campaigns that “may be particularly vulnerable to targeting by hackers and foreign adversaries.” Once enrolled, Facebook said it’ll help campaigns adopt stronger security protections, “like two-factor authentication and monitor for potential hacking threats,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, in a Monday blog post.

Delaware: First new voting machines in decades are on their way | Delaware News Journal

Delaware lawmakers on Monday approved a $13 million contract for Election Systems & Software to supply roughly 1,500 of its new ExpressVote XL voting machines, the state’s first new voting system in decades. But some watchdogs are questioning whether state officials chose the best equipment when they chose to purchase a new and largely unproven voting system. “They had it in their minds to choose this system regardless of the facts about it,” said Jennifer Hill, director of Common Cause Delaware. “This system is brand new so we don’t know what to expect.” Those claims did not dissuade lawmakers Monday from approving a $13 million contract to buy a fleet of new voting machines, along with new systems for registering voters, checking them in at their polling places and counting absentee ballots.

Georgia: Judge won’t force Georgia to use paper ballots for midterms | Associated Press

A federal judge ruled Monday that forcing Georgia to scrap its electronic voting machines in favor of paper ballots for the upcoming midterm elections is too risky, though she said she has grave concerns about the machines that experts have said are vulnerable to hacking. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg’s ruling means the state won’t have to use paper ballots for this year’s midterm elections, including a high-profile gubernatorial contest between the state’s top elections official, Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, and Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state House minority leader who’s trying to become the country’s first black, female governor. Voting integrity advocates and Georgia voters sued state and county election officials, arguing the touchscreen voting machines Georgia has used since 2002 are vulnerable to hacking and provide no way to confirm that votes have been recorded correctly because there’s no paper trail.

Michigan: Forged signatures raise concerns about ballot petition efforts | Detroit Free Press

It’s been a great summer for petition campaigns — most of them, that is. After hundreds of thousands of Michiganders signed petitions, ballots this fall will list three momentous questions — whether to legalize marijuana; whether to end gerrymandering with a nonpartisan method of carving political districts; and whether to expand voting rights in several ways that include allowing straight-party voting, again, as well as allowing “no-reason” absentee voting. To get on the November ballot, these big statewide campaigns had to leap numerous legal hurdles and turn in truckloads of signed petitions that were flyspecked by lawyers or trained volunteers. But some petition efforts didn’t go as well. In Oakland and Macomb counties, two local campaigns — one in Troy, another in Warren — used paid circulators to gather signatures and both ended with cries of “forgery!” That’s giving fuel to the fire of critics who say Michigan should tighten regulations on petition campaigns.