National: File-Sharing Software on State Election Servers Could Expose Them to Intruders | ProPublica

As recently as Monday, computer servers that powered Kentucky’s online voter registration and Wisconsin’s reporting of election results ran software that could potentially expose information to hackers or enable access to sensitive files without a password. The insecure service run by Wisconsin could be reached from internet addresses based in Russia, which has become notorious for seeking to influence U.S. elections. Kentucky’s was accessible from other Eastern European countries. The service, known as FTP, provides public access to files — sometimes anonymously and without encryption. As a result, security experts say, it could act as a gateway for hackers to acquire key details of a server’s operating system and exploit its vulnerabilities. Some corporations and other institutions have dropped FTP in favor of more secure alternatives. Officials in both states said that voter-registration data has not been compromised and that their states’ infrastructure was protected against infiltration. Still, Wisconsin said it turned off its FTP service following ProPublica’s inquiries. Kentucky left its password-free service running and said ProPublica didn’t understand its approach to security.

Editorials: Protect public trust by auditing elections: It’s easier than you might think  | Marc Schneider/The Hill

Pick one word for how the Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election. How about “distrust?” They used trolling, false stories, fake accounts, and cyberattacks to sow distrust among the American people. And without a doubt, Russians and other adversaries are working hard now to spark anger, confusion, and conflict along economic, gender, political, and racial lines within our country. While an effort to reduce confidence in our voting systems — the actual machines and processes we use to register voters and elect our leaders — was a factor in 2016, I believe it will be an even greater factor moving forward. Why? Because it would be so effective. The objectives of campaigns like Russia’s are to divide and demoralize the public, muddy discourse, and discredit and undermine whoever they see as opponents. What better way to do that than by delegitimizing the election results, particularly in hotly contested races where a small number of votes can make all the difference? 

National: Private Equity Controls the Gatekeepers of American Democracy | Bloomberg

Millions of Americans will cast votes in Tuesday’s midterm elections, some on machines that experts say use outdated software or are vulnerable to hacking. If there are glitches or some races are too close to call — or evidence emerges of more meddling attempts by Russia — voters may wake up on Wednesday and wonder: Can we trust the outcome? Meet, then, the gatekeepers of American democracy: Three obscure, private equity-backed companies control an estimated $300 million U.S. voting-machine industry. Though most of their revenue comes from taxpayers, and they play an indispensable role in determining the balance of power in America, the companies largely function in secret. Devices made by Election Systems & Software LLC, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic Inc. will process about nine of every ten ballots next week. Each of the companies is privately held and at least partially controlled by private equity firms. Beyond that, little is known about how they operate or to whom they answer. They don’t disclose financial results and aren’t subject to federal regulation. While the companies say their technology is secure and up-to-date, security experts for years have raised concerns that older, sometimes poorly engineered, equipment can jeopardize the integrity of elections and, more importantly, erode public trust.

National: Hackers targeting election networks across country in lead up to midterms | The Boston Globe

Hackers have ramped up their efforts to meddle with the country’s election infrastructure in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s midterms, sparking a raft of investigations into election interference, internal intelligence documents show. The hackers have targeted voter registration databases, election officials, and networks across the country, from counties in the Southwest to a city government in the Midwest, according to Department of Homeland Security election threat reports reviewed by the Globe. The agency says publicly all the recent attempts have been prevented or mitigated, but internal documents show hackers have had “limited success.” The recent incidents, ranging from injections of malicious computer code to a massive number of bogus requests for voter registration forms, have not been publicly disclosed until now. Federal agencies have logged more than 160 reports of suspected meddling in US elections since Aug. 1, documents show. The pace of suspicious activity has picked up in recent weeks — up to 10 incidents each day — and officials are on high alert.

National: Ready or not, states are about to find out if their election security investments worked | StateScoop

Last month, election officials in Vermont disclosed that the state had notified the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that it had detected a computer with an internet protocol address leading back to Russia snooping around its voter registration database in August. While the state said no data was altered , the incidentwas a reminder that the foreign cyberthreatis still out there, nearly two years after it dominated the conversation about the 2016 campaign. This election cycle, state and local officials who supervise elections have scrambled to add cybersecurity to portfolios that long consisted mostly of registering voters and tabulating ballots. The inflectionpoint came in September 2017, when DHS said that Russian hackers attempted to penetrate the voter registration systems in at least 21 states in 2016 and did so successfully in Illinois. With all that in mind, those state officials have becomeactive partners with the federal government, whileupgrading computer systems, replacing equipment and sharing threat information.On Tuesday, they and their voters will find out if their efforts were worthwhile.

National: Concerns about voter access dominate final stretch before Election Day | The Washington Post

n Saturday, voting rights advocates alerted lawyers for the Georgia secretary of state, as well as the FBI, of a potential vulnerability in the state’s election system that they said could allow hackers to obtain and alter private voter information. On Sunday, Republican Brian Kemp, who as secretary of state controls the state’s election process even as he runs for governor, responded by accusing Democrats of possessing software that could have extracted personal voter data, and his office opened an investigation into what it described as “a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system.” Kemp’s campaign called Democrats “power-hungry radicals” who should be held to account for “their criminal behavior.” Democrats called the probe “an abuse of power.”

National: ‘They Don’t Really Want Us to Vote’: How Republicans Made It Harder | The New York Times

Damon Johnson is a 19-year-old sophomore studying chemical engineering at historically black Prairie View A&M University. He’s learning a lot about voting, too. Mr. Johnson is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last month by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund alleging that rural Waller County has tried to disenfranchise students at the university over decades, most recently by curtailing early voting on campus. The polling station at the university’s student center was restricted to three days of early voting, compared with two weeks in some other parts of the county — and two weeks at majority-white Texas A&M in a nearby county. “I don’t want this to be the reason, but it looks like we’re PVAMU in a predominantly white area and they don’t really want us to vote,” Mr. Johnson said recently.

National: Watch out for vote suppression, other tricks on Election Day | McClatchy

Don’t be surprised by mischief on Election Day. That’s the advice experts give about last-minute text messages, robocalls or emails purporting to instruct people (falsely) on where or when to vote. Bogus text messages have already popped up in Florida, one of many states afflicted by attempts to skew the vote in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections. Early voting has been fraught with problems, including an investigation into alleged hacking of Georgia voter registration systems on Sunday and court battles in the state over who should be allowed on voter rolls, and snafus with antiquated voting machines in Texas. In Kansas, a federal judge upheld Dodge City’s decision to move the only polling place to what one resident called “the middle of nowhere” outside of town. There are tougher ID rules for voters in North Carolina and Kansas, passed by Republican office-holders who want to keep their majorities.. In North Dakota, where officials require a residential address in order to vote, thousands of Native Americans faced a scramble to obtain new state-issued or tribal IDs with street addresses, rather than P.O. boxes, even though their homes often lack numbers and their streets lack names.

National: Homeland Security’s biggest election concern is what comes after you vote | CNET

The biggest concern for election security isn’t about Election Day — it’s about the day after, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said. “My biggest concern is that a foreign entity will take the opportunity after the election, or the night of the election, to attempt to sow discord through social media by suggesting that something’s not working as it should in a particular area,” Nielsen said Friday morning at a Council on Foreign Relations event in New York. The conversation with Nielsen about comes just four days before Election Day and amid major DHS efforts to protect the US elections from foreign interference. That includes assisting election officials in all 50 states, creating its own center toprotect critical infrastructure, and attending Defcon to learn about voting machine flaws. While DHS is working to protect the machines and make sure voting officials are prepared, it’s that wave of disinformation on social media that’ll follow the election that Nielsen’s most worried about.

National: Could Hackers Give Us Another Bush v. Gore? | Washingtonian

The scenario would go like this. On Tuesday, November 6, Americans tune to television sets and radio broadcasts, unlock their phones and keep an eye on their desktop screens, all waiting for the same thing: A definitive account of who has won what in the midterm elections. Throughout the night, election numbers shoot across their screens—live, preliminary return data pumped in from congressional and Senate races across the country, and key gubernatorial races, too. Then, around 10 PM EST, CNN anchors announce the network’s call: The Democrats have taken control of the House, winning 31 of the necessary 24 seats to successfully wrest control from Republicans. On camera, Van Jones and Anderson Cooper waste no time as they begin discussing the implications of the victory and how the midterm results have placed the Trump presidency in a new chapter of turmoil. But there’s a problem. Fox News analysts have just announced the opposite result: In an extraordinary turn of events, Republicans have managed to hang on to their majority by a single seat, retaining control of the House. It’s a major political upset, says Bret Baier, and a replay of Trump’s surprise victory in 2016. And yet for clients of the newswire Reuters, the results are simply opaque—with political analysts there reporting that control of the House, and several nail-biter gubernatorial and Senate races, still remain too close to call.

National: Has US voter suppression become systematic? | Deutsche Welle

Audrey Calkins, a 33-year-old lawyer, had already voted in two elections in her county in the US state of Tennessee when she showed up to vote in the Republican presidential primary on March 1, 2016. That morning, she showed up at the polls bright and early, presented her ID and her voter registration card to the election official, who looked her up in the system. “They told me I wasn’t on the list,” Calkins said. “I said, ‘Check that you’re spelling my name right.'” The official turned his computer screen around so that Calkins could see he was spelling her name correctly, and indeed, she was not on the list. “They said I wasn’t a registered voter,” Calkins said. “I was blown away, because obviously I had just voted a couple of months before in both October and November.” Calkins was turned away from voting.

National: Voting machine errors already roil Texas and Georgia races | Politico

Glitchy paperless voting machines are affecting an untold number of early voting ballots in Texas and Georgia, raising the specter that two of the most closely watched races could be marred by questions about whether the vote count is accurate. Civil rights groups and voters in both states have filed complaints alleging that the ATM-style touchscreen machines inexplicably deleted some people’s votes for Democratic candidates or switched them to Republican votes. The errors — which experts have blamed on outdated software and old machines — would appear to work to the advantage of Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke, and that of Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp over Democrat Stacey Abrams. It’s unclear how many times the errors have happened or whether they could be enough to change the outcome of either race, both of which appear to be tight. But the latest episodes come after at least a decade and a half of warnings from election security groups about the dangers of relying on voting machines that don’t produce a paper trail — saying they’re insecure and produce results that are impossible to audit.

National: Securing voting machines means raising funds | The Parallax

There likely isn’t a quick fix for complex U.S. election integrity challenges such as social-engineering interference on Facebook. Experts say there is a straightforward response, however, to vulnerable voting-machine software. The problem is that it involves cooperation in Congress. When the Senate failed to move the Secure Elections Act forward in August because of White House concerns over states’ rights, coupled with funding concerns, the United States lost its best chance this year of taking steps toward patching voting machines. The most recent federal dollars devoted to improving elections came from the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002, which was itself flawed because its authors failed to predict cybersecurity standards for voting machines. The idea of hackers infiltrating computerized voting machines at the time was “completely ridiculous,” says Margaret MacAlpine, a voting-machine security researcher and a founding partner of cybersecurity consultancy Nordic Innovation Labs. “The cybersecurity threat was more than science fiction at that point,” she says. And even now, as knowledge that the machines are vulnerable to hackers spreads, there is still a lack of political will to allocate the funds needed to replace them and ensure that new machines are secured against attacks, she says.

National: A Voter’s Guide to Election Security | Associated Press

Americans are now voting in the first major election since Russians launched a broad assault on the 2016 presidential campaign. And while election officials and security experts remain vigilant through Election Day, voters have a critical role in the fight to keep elections safe and accessible. The average voter shouldn’t be too concerned about foreign interference in elections, said Maurice Turner, a senior technologist at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C. But, he said, that doesn’t mean she should be passive about secure elections. By understanding the system, its flaws and what needs changing, voters can call for accountability from election officials and state policymakers. “I’m hoping for a quiet Election Day,” Turner said. “I’m hoping that we can focus on the issues that are on the ballot versus how we’re going to count the ballot.” Malicious actors might attack the midterms by manipulating voter registration rolls. While a May report from the Senate Intelligence Committee said the “U.S. election infrastructure is fundamentally resilient,” it also outlined Russian attempts in 2016 to scan election systems in 21 states and aggressively try to infiltrate six of them.

Editorials: Rigging the vote: how the American right is on the way to permanent minority rule | Ian Samuel/The Guardian

The American right is in the midst of a formidable project: installing permanent minority rule, guaranteeing control of the government even as the number of actual human beings who support their political program dwindles. Voter suppression is one, but only one, loathsome tactic in this effort, which goes far beyond just winning one election. Minority rule is the result of interlocking and mutually reinforcing strategies which must be understood together to understand the full picture of what the American right wants to achieve. Examples are everywhere. Take North Dakota. In 2012, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, won a surprise victory in a Senate race by just 2,994 votes. Her two largest county wins were in the Standing Rock and Turtle Mountain Reservations, where she won more than 80% of the vote. Her overall vote margin in counties containing Native reservations was more than 4,500 votes. Observing that Heitkamp literally owed her seat to Native voters, North Dakota’s Republican legislature enacted a voter ID law that requires voters to present identification showing their name, birth date and residential address. There’s the rub: many Native voters do not have traditional residential addresses, so this law effectively disenfranchises them.

Editorials: Joining The Poll Worker Army On Election Day’s Front Lines | Pam Fessler/NPR

On Nov. 6, I’ll join almost a million other Americans who have volunteered — for a minimal fee — to help man the polls. It’s an extraordinary thing when you think about it. This army bands together for a single day (or several, if you include early voting) to make sure every American can exercise one of their most fundamental rights. For all the talk of “rigged” elections, cyberthreats, voter suppression and fraud, it’s often those on the front lines who most affect your voting experience. And that responsibility has only become more complicated. After reporting about voting for NPR for 18 years, I decided that it was finally time to work at the polls. I’m usually covering the story, but this year I’m off writing a book and had the time. I started with poll worker training class. In my class of 18, all but two of us were women. We began the four-hour session getting tested on some of the rules, especially for voters with disabilities. No, a voter who wants assistance does not need a note from their doctor. Yes, voters can get help reading and even marking their ballot, as long as the helper fills out a Voter Assistance Form and is not their boss, union representative or a candidate. And doesn’t tell them how to vote.

Editorials: Judges Are Telling Minority Voters They’re Probably Being Disenfranchised, but It’s Too Late to Do Anything About It | Richard Hasen/Slate

In separate rulings on Thursday, two federal courts had the same message for minority voters making credible claims of potential disenfranchisement: Your arguments may be good on the merits, but it’s too late. These courts, which were examining onerous voting rules in North Dakota and Kansas, took their cues from the U.S. Supreme Court, which has embraced an unfortunate rule that even serious voting problems cannot be remedied in the period before Election Day. Native American voters in North Dakota filed suit a while back over the state changing its voter-identification law to make it harder for Native American voters living on reservations and lacking a residential street address to be able to vote. A federal court, seeing that this law could disenfranchise up to 2,000 Native American voters, had blocked the requirement for use in the midterm elections, but the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reversed. In reversing, the court said there was no proof yet that the law would actually disenfranchise Native American voters, who could potentially get residential street addresses assigned to them before the election. (The Supreme Court, over the dissents of Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, refused to intervene.) And the 8th Circuit order came with a promise: “If any resident of North Dakota lacks a current residential street address and is denied an opportunity to vote on that basis, the courthouse doors remain open.” That promise has now gone unfulfilled.

Voting Blogs: This Software is Exposing State Election Servers to Intruders | Democracy Chronicles

A ProPublica analysis found election computer servers in Wisconsin and Kentucky could be susceptible to hacking. Wisconsin shut down its service in response to our inquiries. As recently as Monday, computer servers that powered Kentucky’s online voter registration and Wisconsin’s reporting of election results ran software that could potentially expose information to hackers or enable access to sensitive files without a password. The insecure service run by Wisconsin could be reached from internet addresses based in Russia, which has become notorious for seeking to influence U.S. elections. Kentucky’s was accessible from other Eastern European countries. The service, known as FTP, provides public access to files — sometimes anonymously and without encryption. As a result, security experts say, it could act as a gateway for hackers to acquire key details of a server’s operating system and exploit its vulnerabilities. Some corporations and other institutions have dropped FTP in favor of more secure alternatives.

Arizona: Minorities, poor areas most affected by Maricopa County voter purges | Arizona Republic

Maricopa County residents have been purged from the voter rolls nearly 1.1 million times since the 2008 election. Nearly half, or 491,944, of the removals happened, as required by state statute, after the Maricopa County Elections Department mails a notice — an early ballot or a voter guide — to a voter and it is returned undelivered by the U.S. Postal Service. If the initial and subsequent notices are undelivered, the individual is designated “inactive.” Inactive voters who do not update their registrations or vote in the following two general elections are removed from the rolls. It’s a policy intended to ensure the rolls include only people who are eligible to vote, and, supporters say, it helps prevent fraud. The remainder of the purges are largely voters who moved out of the county or died.

Florida: Key to election security, Florida’s voter rolls have troubled tech history | Palm Beach Post

Long before Florida’s online voter registration system malfunctioned and temporarily throttled back new registrations last month, long before Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher called it a glitch-prone “mess” in need of review, Florida’s system for maintaining voter registration records was dogged by reports of serious flaws. Everything from software security to unauthorized access to voters’ personal information were among the problems cited in Auditor General reports and follow-ups from 2006 through mid-2015. Last month, Bucher discovered a new problem: Just as Floridians are poised to head to the polls for the most contested midterm elections in recent memory, the state’s brand new online voter registration system crashed. Voter registration, and how those registration records are kept, is more than a tech-induced headache. When Russian-sponsored hackers tried to worm their way into the elections systems of 21 states in 2016, state-housed voter registration records were prime targets.

Georgia: Without disclosing evidence, Kemp accuses Georgia Democrats of hacking | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Just two days before the election, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office launched an investigation Sunday into the Democratic Party after an alleged attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system. Kemp, who is the Republican candidate for governor on Tuesday’s ballot, didn’t provide any evidence of hacking when his office announced the probe. He faces Democrat Stacey Abrams in the election. The Democratic Party of Georgia called the allegation “100 percent false” and “an abuse of power” by Kemp’s office. A computer scientist and an attorney suing Kemp said his office’s accusation of hacking is a distraction from a report that voter information is vulnerable on the state’s registration website. The Secretary of State’s Office said the system remains secure and voter information wasn’t breached.

Georgia: Kemp’s Aggressive Gambit to Distract from Election Security Crisis | WhoWhatWhy

When Georgia Democrats were alerted to what they believe to be major vulnerabilities in the state’s voter registration system Saturday, they contacted computer security experts who verified the problems. They then notified Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s lawyers and national intelligence officials in the hope of getting the problems fixed. Instead of addressing the security issues, Kemp’s office put out a statement Sunday saying he had opened an investigation that targets the Democrats for hacking. Kemp’s statement has become top news nationwide, but the context and background have yet to be reported — so we are providing it below. By the time Democrats reached out to the experts, Kemp’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had already been alerted to the problem on Saturday morning by David Cross of the Morrison Foerster law firm. Cross is an attorney for one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Kemp and other elections officials concerning cyber weaknesses in Georgia’s election system. A man who claims to be a Georgia resident said he stumbled upon files in his My Voter Page on the secretary of state’s website. He realized the files were accessible. That man then reached out to one of Cross’s clients, who then put the source and Cross in touch on Friday. The next morning, Cross called John Salter, a lawyer who represents Kemp and the secretary of state’s office. Cross also notified the FBI.

Georgia: Judge Tosses Georgia’s ‘Exact Match’ Voter ID Rule for Midterm | Courthouse News

A federal judge ruled Friday that Georgia’s “exact match” requirement for voter identification “places a severe burden” on prospective voters and will not apply for next Tuesday’s midterm election. The “exact match” law applied by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who also happens to running for governor in a tight race against Democrat Stacey Abrams, marks an applicant’s registration as “pending” if the personal information on their voter registration form doesn’t exactly match the information on the state’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. If marked pending, the applicant has 26 months to provide the accurate information to the secretary of state’s office. In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross said if allowed to stand, the state’s “exact match” requirement would cause some to “suffer irreparable harm if they lose the right to vote.”

Kentucky: Online voter registration left system vulnerable to attack | Louisville Courier Journal

Heralded as the state voting system’s “most transformational reform to date,” the ability for Kentuckians to register to vote online also made them vulnerable to attack. A ProPublica investigation found that as recently as this week, a computer server powering Kentucky’s voter registration website was inadvertently exposing sensitive back-end files to hackers. Kentucky introduced online voter registration in 2016. At the time, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes said the move would pave the way for increased participation in elections. … “FTP is a 40-year-old protocol that is insecure and not being retired quickly enough,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., and an advocate for better voting security. “Every communication sent via FTP is not secure, meaning anyone in the hotel, airport or coffee shop on the same public Wi-Fi network that you are on can see everything sent and received. “And malicious attackers can change the contents of a transmission without either side detecting the change.”

Missouri: Missouri Stops More ‘Mentally Incapacitated’ People From Voting Than Anywhere Else | KCUR

Of all the freedoms Anthony Flanagan lost during his eight years under state care, the right to vote was among the toughest. Flanagan, a quadriplegic who was deemed unable to care for himself because of psychiatric issues, lived under a legal guardianship by the state of Missouri from 2008 to 2016. Often seen as protective of people incapacitated by mental illness or developmental disabilities, guardianship can also strip people of many rights the rest of us enjoy, including the right to vote. Flanagan admired Barack Obama during his presidential run in 2008, thinking him intelligent and articulate. Though he doesn’t consider himself a member of either political party, Flanagan was disappointed that the state deprived him of the chance to vote in an historic election. “Like most of the country, I was like ‘Wow, they’re really gonna elect a black president! This is cool,” Flanagan, now 49, said. “I was like, ‘Oh man, I wish I could vote.’”

North Dakota: Native Americans Fight for the Right to Vote in North Dakota | The Intercept

To find Honorata Defender’s home on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, mention her name to whoever you can find walking down the main street of her tiny town. They’ll tell you to turn when you get to the powwow grounds and to take the paved road, rather than the gravel one. Drive until you see a hill, and look for her car. Her house has no number on it, and mail is not delivered there; it goes to a P.O. box instead. As Defender put it, “We’ve never believed that a person can own land; it’s the land that owns us.” She added, “The concept of an address wasn’t a big deal.” Defender was working at her job as a reporter for the Corson/Sioux County News-Messenger — the local paper that covers Standing Rock, including one of the key North Dakota counties that voted Democrat in 2012’s Senate election — when she learned that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld North Dakota’s voter ID law. The law will require each voter to present identification that displays a residential address, a major barrier for tribal members, since thousands of Native voters don’t use a home address. Defender’s home is on the South Dakota side of Standing Rock, but it is typical of the communities throughout the reservation.

Tennessee: Concerns Over Voter Registrations Loom in Shelby County | Associated Press

Concerns about voter registrations and the security of electronic voting machines are looming over the upcoming election in Tennessee’s largest county. Two lawsuits have been filed in connection with Tuesday’s pivotal election in Shelby County, the largest by population in Tennessee and the one that includes Memphis. Election officials there have pushed back against allegations of voter suppression and that they are not doing enough to protect the election process. Tennessee features a race for governor and a tight U.S. Senate race between Republican Marsha Blackburn, who served 16 years in the U.S. House, and Democrat Phil Bredesen, a former Tennessee governor. The Senate race is being closely watched nationally as Democrats try to flip the seat in a state with relatively low voter turnout.

Virginia: Old software, equipment create Election Day security concerns | WSLS

Midterm elections are just a few days away and the security of the country’s voting systems and machines will be a top priority. 10 News talked with Randy Marchany, Virginia Tech’s information technology security officer, about the possible threats on Election Day. “There’s nothing more critical in a democracy than to vote and have that vote counted accurately,” Marchany said. He said one security concern is the age of the equipment and software currently in use. “A lot of localities across the country are using voting machines that have been around for 10 years, and in computer terms, that is geologic,” Marchany said. “That is in the dinosaur age in terms of what the technology was in 2008, 2006, and this is the type of machines that are being used.”

Wisconsin: Elections Commission shuts down dormant file sharing service after reporter inquiry | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

State elections officials eliminated an unused, password-protected file sharing service to further protect the state’s election system from hackers. The move came after a reporter with the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica inquired about whether the service was susceptible to hacking, according to Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesman Reid Magney. The organization’s scrutiny of the security of Wisconsin’s election system comes days before Tuesday’s midterm elections and amid concerns that the Russian-based interference in the 2016 general election could return this year. In the 2016 election, Russians attempted to hack elections systems in Wisconsin and 20 other states ahead of the presidential election. 

India: Online voting not feasible: Former election commissioner S Y Qureshi | Times of India

Former chief election commissioner S Y Qureshi on Sunday ruled out the possibility of online voting in India in near future. Online voting is not feasible here because of reasons related to security and integrity. “People can be put at gunpoint to vote for anyone or can be bribed,” Qureshi said, while speaking at a programme, “Mission 2019 — No Voter Left Behind”. The programme was organised by the Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy. The former CEC asked all voters to check their names on the voters’ list. He said a voter card doesn’t ensure one’s voting right. “Because names can be deleted for wrong reasons or due to computer errors.” He said that while he was the CEC, he had faced an uncomfortable situation becasue Arvind Kejriwal’s name was not on the voters’ list. However, it was found out that his name was listed in a different constituency where he used to stay earlier and finally he was able to cast his vote.