Latvia: Russia launched cyber-attacks against Latvia, claims security service | LSM.LV

Latvia’s state security service the Constitution Protection Bureau (SAB) said October 8 that Russia has in the past launched several cyber-attacks against Latvia. In a rare statement posted to its website, SAB said that like the Netherlands – which recently went public with claims it had been subjected to cyber-attacks from the Russian Federation – Latvia too had been targeted several times, naming Russia’s GRU military intelligence service specifically as the perpetrator. “The cyber attacks in Latvia were carried out by the GRU for espionage purposes, and the most frequent attacks were directed against state institutions, including the foreign and defense sectors. Rarely, attacks were targeted at private companies, including the media. The essence of cyber-attacks carried out by GRU is to enter an information system, operate in it unnoticed, and obtain long-term data from the system – for example, regular access to e-mail correspondence and documents processed at the workstation,” SAB said.

Mozambique: Local elections to test peace progress | AFP

Mozambique holds local elections on Wednesday in a vote that could test progress in the country’s peace talks after the ruling Frelimo party was accused of violence and intimidation during the campaign. The main opposition Renamo party, which has maintained an armed wing since the end of the country’s civil war, is running in the municipal polls for the first time in 10 years. Renamo fought a brutal 16-year civil war against the Marxist-inspired Frelimo government that devastated the economy and left one million people dead. When the war ended in 1992, the group soon began participating in elections. In 2013, a wave of fresh violence erupted between Renamo rebels and government troops, raising fears of a return to civil war. But three years later, the party declared a truce and opened fresh peace talks with the government.

National: Election security is a mess, and the cleanup wont arrive by the midterms | CNET

For many, the most intense race leading up to Election Day won’t be among politicians. It’ll be the mad, final scramble by county officials and tech companies to make sure your votes are safe from hackers. But with the slow pace of funding, unprepared campaigns and lack of cooperation among counties, many cybersecurity experts wonder if they’ll reach that finish line by the first Tuesday in November. An election director in Illinois, for instance, still hasn’t received any federal funding for cybersecurity. A security expert who traveled across the country to train campaigns found shockingly inadequate protection.  

National: Ahead of US election, angst over hacking threats | AFP

At a Boston technology conference last month, computer scientist Alex Halderman showed how easy it was to hack into an electronic voting machine and change the result, without leaving a trace. Halderman staged a mock election in which three conference attendees voted for George Washington, but an infected memory card switched the result to give a 2-1 victory to Benedict Arnold, the military officer who sold secrets during the Revolutionary War. Halderman’s demonstration was on a voting machine still in use in 20 US states, which had no paper ballots that could be compared to the electronic output, and thus no way to determine if vote totals had been altered. “What keeps me up at night is the threat that a hostile nation-state could probe every swing state or swing district (and) find the ones most weakly protected, to silently change the results of a national election,” the University of Michigan professor said.

National: Are wireless voting machines vulnerable? | McClatchy

Barely a month before midterm elections, voting integrity advocates and electronic voting experts want the federal government to issue an official warning to states that use voting machines with integrated cellular modems that the machines are vulnerable to hacks, potentially interfering with the ballot counting. Once seen as a useful tool to provide quick election results, voting machines with cellular modems are now subject to fierce debate over how easy it would be to break into them and change the results. Such machines are certified for use in Florida, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. … But a number of voting machine researchers take issue with such assertions, saying that cellular networks increasingly overlap with the internet and open avenues for hackers to interfere with unofficial early results even when there are paper ballots that can be tallied for a slower official count. They say interfering with unofficial early results, even when corrected later, could increase mistrust among voters and add uncertainty immediately after elections conclude.

California: Primary season cyberattacks illuminate campaign vulnerabilities | The Hill

The spotlight on cyber vulnerabilities of political campaigns has grown brighter after three Democratic campaigns in California were hacked during the state’s primary elections. The campaigns of Bryan Caforio, Hans Keirstead and David Min all fell victim to cyber intrusions this year, underscoring a shortcoming that applies to political operations of various sizes: insufficient protections to guard against cyberattacks. The problem is particularly acute for smaller-scale campaigns, which often have fewer resources to ensure their technology and communications are secure, while incumbents can draw from bigger campaign accounts. But having more cash on hand doesn’t always mean it’ll be used to beef up protections. A recent McClatchy analysis of Federal Election Commission filings found that only six candidates running for seats in the House and Senate this election cycle have spent more than $1,000 on cybersecurity measures.

Georgia: Outage halts voter registration at driver’s license offices | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Just days before Tuesday’s deadline to register to vote in Georgia, all voter registration shut down for nearly the entire day Friday at every Department of Driver Services location in the state. The department said its software operator, the global corporation IDEMIA, had taken full responsibility for the failure. David Connell, the chairman of the DDS’ oversight board, said he was confident in the vendor’s statement that the problem resulted from a database overload, not a cyber intrusion. “It’s an issue we all wish wouldn’t have happened,” Connell said. IDEMIA did not respond to a phone message left by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at its Virginia representative office.

Maryland: Gerrymandering case is back in court where judges floated an independent mapping commission as a fix | The Washington Post

Federal judges in Maryland floated the idea Thursday of ­taking the state’s congressional voting map out of the hands of political leaders and leaving the drawing of electoral lines to an independent, nonpartisan com­mission. A three-judge panel pressed the attorney general’s office and Republican voters challenging the electoral map about the possibility of settling their long-running case as it arrived back in court for the first time since the Supreme Court declined to immediately review the matter of redrawn maps. The high court in June avoided answering the question of when extreme partisan gerry­mandering is unconstitutional in the Maryland case involving a Democratic-drawn map — and in another from Wisconsin involving a Republican-led effort.

Editorials: Missouri’s voter ID law was designed to discourage voting. It should go. | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Long before Donald Trump first spouted his lie that hordes of illegal voters had swarmed the polling places — his transparent attempt to soothe his own ego and explain to the nation his substantial loss of the 2016 popular vote — the Republican Party was already fully engaged in its own ongoing big lie about voter fraud. With demographics working against it, the party for years has falsely claimed rampant illegal voting, with the goal of suppressing as many Democratic votes as possible. The marriage of convenience between the GOP’s partisan cynicism and Trump’s narcissism led to last year’s creation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission yielded few if any new findings of fraud but wasted lots of time, money and resources. Around the same time, a Missouri law requiring voters to show a photo ID before casting their votes took effect. As with Trump’s fake commission, it was a deliberately cumbersome solution to a nonexistent problem. Now a judge is pondering whether to throw out Missouri’s voter ID law on constitutional grounds. He should.

Ohio: Challenge to Ohio’s voting roll purges persists after Supreme Court decision | Cleveland Plain Dealer

Three months after they lost a U.S. Supreme Court challenge to Ohio’s process for removing inactive voters from its rolls, the lawsuit’s plaintiffs are back in federal court with a related claim: the notification forms Ohio used to initiate voter removal are illegal. The plaintiffs say all voters the state deleted from the rolls from 1995 through 2016 through the disputed process upheld by the Supreme Court were actually removed unlawfully because the state’s notices for removal didn’t comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. On Sept. 14, the Ohio A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless and Larry Harmon asked U.S. District Judge George C. Smith to reinstate all eligible voters who were sent the deficient notices, or take other measures to protect their voting rights in next month’s election.

Pennsylvania: Voters reported being blocked from State election site — and from obtaining absentee ballots — as early as 2016 | Philadelphia Inquirer

Pennsylvania election officials say they first learned last week that their new security measures blocking foreign access to state election sites were preventing voters abroad from accessing their absentee ballots. But voters living outside the country told the Inquirer and Daily News they had trouble much earlier. “Definitely I can tell you from my own experience, this happened in the May primary,” said Portia Kamons, 56, who lived in Southwestern Pennsylvania before moving to the United Kingdom nearly three decades ago. Kamons said she contacted the Pennsylvania Department of State and other officials to report the problem. When the state sent emails a few weeks ago directing voters to the same site — which remains blocked — Kamons said she was “hopping mad” that nothing had been done. Other users also reported being blocked from seeing election results in January and March on the state site and prevented from opening the voter registration page in October 2016.

Virginia: House GOP cancels redistricting session, says lawmakers are ‘unlikely’ to meet court’s deadline | Richmond Times-Dispatch

Republican leaders in the Virginia House of Delegates have canceled a planned Oct. 21 floor session on redistricting, saying they see no point in coming to the Capitol to work on a plan Gov. Ralph Northam promised to veto. Barring unforeseen changes, the move all but guarantees that a court-appointed expert, not the General Assembly, will redraw the House map before the 2019 legislative elections in order to comply with a federal court order on racial gerrymandering. Republicans are appealing the June ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the GOP majority acknowledged for the first time Friday that Northam’s veto threat means the House won’t be able to pass a new map by the Oct. 30 deadline set by a federal court. In an update filed with the three-judge panel, Republicans said “a legislative solution is unlikely to occur” by the deadline, making the Oct. 21 session in Richmond a futile exercise.

Afghanistan: Fresh Afghan Hostilities Fuel Security Concerns Ahead of Elections | VoA News

Fresh fighting in central and eastern Afghanistan has killed at least 20 people, half of them civilians, fueling security concerns among voters ahead of this month’s parliamentary elections. Authorities in the central Maidan Wardak province confirmed Sunday the Taliban overnight staged a major offensive on the Sayed Abad district headquarters. The insurgents briefly overran key government installations in Sayed Abad, killing the district police chief along with at least nine other policemen. The Taliban also set fire to some official buildings before withdrawing from the district center, a usual rebel tactic. Sayed Abad is located on the main highway linking the national capital of Kabul to southern Afghanistan. Insurgents blew up bridges on the highway before assaulting the district, blocking all traffic, the provincial governor, Mohammad Arif Shajahan, confirmed Sunday. The Taliban has also planted mines on parts of the high, he added.

Australia: State government hacked in massive computer network attacks | WAToday

The state government has faced a massive onslaught of computer network attacks since the last election, with tens of millions of attempted intrusions and successful hacks on the Premier’s department, Main Roads, the finance and local government departments. In answers to parliamentary questions asked by opposition frontbencher Zak Kirkup, the government also revealed it had been subject to attacks on its information systems by “nation-state foreign actors”. The Department of Finance, which also provides information security for the Department of Treasury, bore the brunt of the attacks, recording 15.5 million intrusion attempts on its networks and website. Of these, 11 attacks were successful, but Treasurer Ben Wyatt said there had been “no indication that any Cabinet or customer-related material was compromised”.

Bosnia: Pro-Russian Serb leader wins seat in Bosnia’s presidency | Associated Press

Pro-Russia Serb leader Milorad Dodik won a race to fill the Serb seat in Bosnia’s three-member presidency Sunday, deepening ethnic divisions in the country that faced a brutal war some 25 years ago. Preliminary official results from the election gave Dodik 56 percent of the vote and his main opponent, Mladen Ivanic, 42 percent. The projections were made with 44 percent of ballots counted. “The will of the people leaves no doubt what they want,” Dodik said, adding that voters “punished” his opponent for his “servile policies toward the West.” Ivanic conceded defeat. Complete official returns were expected Monday. Dodik advocates the eventual separation of Serbs from Bosnia. His election to the three-person presidency, which also has a Muslim member and a Croat member, deals a blow to efforts to strengthen unity in the country, where ethnic divisions fueled the 1992-95 war that killed 100,000 people and left millions homeless.

Brazil: Bolsonaro questions Brazil’s voting machines—especially if he loses | Quartz

Brazil’s electronic ballot boxes are internationally admired:  The country welcomes foreign delegations that travel here to study them, and sends experts to other nations to teach them about the technology. But as the country goes to vote today (Oct. 7) in a deeply polarized election, conspiracy theories spread by frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro, a radical right-wing populist, are casting doubts on their infallibility. The attack on the machines threatens to call into question the integrity of Brazil’s entire electoral process. The machines are mandatory in 460,000 voting stations across Brazil’s five regions, and have become iconic in Brazil since they were first used in 1996. Their instantly recognizable sound indicating a vote has been cast is used in political ads. They’re touted on TV on election day, with segments showing the challenges electoral workers face to transport the boxes containing them—be it by truck in São Paulo, by bus in Rio, or by boat in the Amazon. The country even lends the machines to fellow Latin American nations for tests (in countries like Argentina, Haiti, Equador, and Mexico) or for actual elections (like in the tiny neighboring nation of Paraguay).

Brazil: Only the grandest of coalitions can now defeat Bolsonaro | The Guardian

Brazilian leftists heaved a huge collective sigh of relief on Sunday night after Jair Bolsonaro – the homophobic, dictatorship-praising far-right front-runner – fell just short of a stunning first-round victory that would have made him president of one of the world’s largest and most diverse democracies. Their relief may well be short-lived. Fernando Haddad, Bolsonaro’s opponent in the pivotal second-round vote on 28 October, has a mountain almost as high as Brazil’s Pico da Neblina to climb if he is to scupper the right-wing populist’s dramatic political ascent. Bolsonaro secured more than 49m votes on Sunday – 46% of the total and just shy of the majority he needed for an outright win – while his Workers’ party (PT) opponent won just 29%, or 31m votes.

Cameroon: Presidential poll marked by deadly separatist violence | AFP

Cameroon voted on Sunday in a presidential election marked by deadly violence in the country’s English-speaking regions and the cancellation of voting in at least one affected area over security fears.
Cameroon has been rocked by a separatist insurgency from within its anglophone minority, who number around five million, since last October. They accuse likely election winner President Paul Biya, 85, of oppression and are concentrated in the northwest and southwest of the majority-francophone country. Poll closed at 1700 GMT with the law stating that final results must be announced within 15 days. After voting got under way Sunday, security forces shot dead three suspected separatists who had allegedly fired at passersby from a motorcycle in Bamenda, the main city in the northwest region, a local official said.

Gabon: Ruling party claims election win | Al Jazeera

President Ali Bongo’s ruling Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG) has won a legislative election by a landslide in the first round, the presidency said. “We have observed what looks like a landslide in favour of the [ruling] majority,” presidential spokesman Ike Ngouoni said on Sunday, citing results posted publicly at voting stations. He said the PDG had won 80 of the 143 seats in the national parliament. Ngouoni said turnout was “relatively weak”. The presidential spokesman said the electoral authority would announce definitive results later Sunday or on Monday.

Romania: Weak voter turnout voids gay marriage referendum | Associated Press

A referendum aimed at putting same-sex marriage further out of reach in Romania was invalidated Sunday after a quick tally showed too few voters cast ballots, election officials said. The weekend vote on a constitutional amendment that would have changed the definition of family to make marriage a union between a man and a woman instead of between “spouses” required voter turnout of at least 30 percent for the result to stand. Election officials said after polls closed that only 20.41 of eligible voters participated. The turnout threshold never was close to being reached all day, a trend that gay rights group Accept said showed citizens “want a Romania based upon democratic values.” “We have shown that we cannot be fooled by a political agenda that urges us to hate and polarize society,” the group said in a statement before the turnout number was final.

National: Keep calm and trust the feds on Election Day, national security officials tell states | The Washington Post

With midterm races in the home stretch and the 2020 presidential election on the horizon, a pair of top national security officials have a message for state election administrators: Trust us when we warn you about cyberthreats. William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, and Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity chief, urged state officials to keep their lines open to the feds as Election Day approaches and the possibility of an attack on their systems looms large. “At some point in your future, next month or 2020, there will be a piece of intelligence that comes so fast and furious in the community, the phone call will be made to Chris that will tell him, ‘Hey, this happened and we need to act,’ ” Evanina said Wednesday at an election security summit on Capitol Hill with state leaders and members of Congress. “Chris will pick up the phone and call a state and say, ‘You need to do something.’ And you have to trust Chris.” 

National: Overseas Voters Having Trouble Getting Ballots As States Try To Thwart Hacking | HuffPost

Thousands of U.S. voters living overseas have encountered difficulties requesting absentee ballots because of state restrictions on internet traffic as part of efforts to secure their election systems, according to a report in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Federal law requires states to provide eligible U.S. voters based in foreign countries with a chance to get an absentee ballot. But some of these voters are having problems accessing official election websites to get information and, in some cases, download ballots, the Inquirer reported. The snags are occurring because of the steps taken by states to restrict traffic from foreign countries or entities to prevent potential interference with the election process, including the vote count. The Inquirer identified five states where voters were unable to load websites this week: Georgia, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont. Wanda Murren, a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania Department of State, said her office first learned of the download problems experienced by overseas voters were on Sept. 25. Three days later, she said, the federal agency that helps overseas voters ― including military families ― cast ballots informed the office the problem was more widespread than previously believed.

National: Mike Pence accuses China of meddling in US elections despite lack of evidence | The Guardian

Mike Pence has claimed that Russian interference in US elections “pales in comparison” with Chinese meddling, which he said was aimed at ousting Donald Trump. The vice-president’s allegation echoes a similar claim made by the president at the UN last week, but it has been contradicted by cybersecurity experts and the administration has yet to provide any supporting evidence, other than to point to instances of overt lobbying. The administration’s own secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, said: “We currently have no indication that a foreign adversary intends to disrupt our election infrastructure. “We know they [the Chinese] have the capability and we know they have the will. So we’re constantly on alert to watch. But what we see with China right now are the influence campaigns, the more traditional, longstanding, holistic influence campaigns,” Nielsen said on Tuesday at a Washington Post cybersecurity conference.

National: Senate Punts on Beefed-Up Election Security Until After Midterms | Bloomberg

Legislation to increase protection of voting systems from foreign hackers is gaining support in the Senate. Just don’t expect the chamber to take it up before the November elections. Senate Rules and Administration Committee Chairman Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said he supports the bill (S. 2593). It just isn’t needed to make sure the midterm elections are safe, Blunt told state and local election officials at a Capitol Hill conference sponsored by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.“We’re not going to get anything in law between now and Election Day,” Blunt said. “Everything we want is basically happening, but I still would like to see it in law,” Blunt said. He said heightened awareness of security threats since 2016 would help protect voting this November, though it would still be worthwhile to enact changes to protect future elections.

Louisiana: Proposal to double voting machines drove up costs | Associated Press

When Louisiana shopped for new voting machines, the state told vendors it wanted to double the number of machines it uses for elections, a decision that helped drive up the cost of the contract proposals to a higher-than-expected price tag. The secretary of state’s office solicited bids to buy or lease nearly 20,000 voting machines — to replace the 10,000 early voting and Election Day machines it currently has. The agency described wanting to replace voting machines bought in 2005 with smaller devices, improved technology, bolstered security and a paper record of votes. But it didn’t publicize the effort also could double the inventory of machines.

Maryland: Court suggests settlement talks in Maryland congressional redistricting case | Baltimore Sun

A federal court on Thursday suggested settlement discussions be pursued in a case in which Republican voters in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District want to toss out a map they say was unfairly crafted to benefit Democrats. The three-judge panel made the recommendation during a hearing on the case in Baltimore, according to the state attorney general’s office, which is defending the current district boundaries. The options for U.S. District Court Chief Judge James Bredar and two other federal judges could include having a nonpartisan redistricting commission redraw the boundaries, asking lawmakers to redo the map, or preserving the current district lines.

Michigan: House approves online voter registration | Detroit Free Press

With just more than a month to go before the Nov. 6 general election, the Michigan House of Representatives unanimously approved a package of bills Wednesday that will allow people to register to vote online. While the Senate still needs to concur on technical changes made to the bills, the legislation is expected to go into effect next year and be ready before the next presidential election in 2020.

Nevada: Many ex-felons in Nevada can regain right to vote, but thousands held back by misconceptions, opaque process | The Nevada Independent

Kevin Wong voted in the 2008 election, but after being convicted on charges including armed robbery, theft and aggravated assault, he never thought he’d be able to go to the polls again. “I was released from prison on Nov. 6,” he said — two days before the 2016 elections. “And I found it ironic that although I’d watched every debate inside, I was now disenfranchised.” But with help from the Restore Your Vote campaign, which helps people with criminal records navigate a complicated patchwork of state laws that limit or revoke their voting rights, Wong was able to determine he is, in fact, allowed to vote. Last week, he received his voter registration card, and he plans to cast his vote in the general election.

Pennsylvania: State acts to help overseas voters get around ballot barrier | WITF

Officials who oversee voting in Pennsylvania on Wednesday promoted ways for people living overseas to obtain absentee ballots after some encountered computer barriers set up to prevent meddling with elections. The Department of State outlined new procedures the same day The Philadelphia Inquirer reported instructions for overseas voters had led some voters to an online dead-end. Those who are unable to obtain a ballot should call a toll-free number or email the agency’s help desk, where staff has been bolstered to address the problem. Department of State communications director Wanda Murren said it was not clear how many people ran into the cyber barrier, but it did not affect all overseas ballot applicants. She said officials realized they had a problem within the past couple weeks and instituted changes Monday, as they also notified about 4,000 people who had already requested to receive their ballots electronically about the new procedures.

Utah: Mitt Romney’s Senate run makes Utah’s election a target for Russian hackers, lieutenant governor says | The Salt Lake Tribune

Utah’s government systems face “hundreds of millions” of attacks each day from hackers in Russia, China and elsewhere, Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox said Tuesday. And those attacks are likely to intensify ahead of November’s election, Cox said, as a result of past criticisms of Russia by Mitt Romney, the state’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. “We knew that alone might make us more of a target,” Cox said of Romney’s candidacy. Cox, who oversees elections in Utah, was confident the state’s government websites and voting systems can withstand the attacks. Millions of dollars have gone into updating Utah’s voting machines and cybersecurity protocols, he said, and the transition to a statewide vote-by-mail process decreases the likelihood of fraudulent votes on a mass scale. “We have a paper trail for every vote that is cast in the state,” he said.