Nevada: State taking steps to prevent election hacking | Las Vegas Sun

Election officials across the country are looking to shore up election systems against hacking, a facet of the 2016 election that led to a yearlong congressional investigation. Nevada is organizing cybersecurity under a new central hub, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, and is among more than 35 states sending officials to a cyber security incident response training at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center in Massachusetts later this month. Hackers linked to Russia targeted election systems in 21 states during the 2016 election. The Nevada Secretary of State announced in September that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed Nevada was not one of those states.

New York: Board of Elections To Roll Out ‘Electronically Assisted’ Voter Registration | Gotham Gazette

New York’s voting and registration laws have long been derided as onerous and needlessly restrictive, falling far behind most other states that have implemented modern methods to register and cast a vote. While significant changes to state election laws are being debated in Albany ahead of a new state budget, the New York City Board of Elections may improve, albeit incrementally, people’s access to the ballot by soon providing digital aid to register to vote. The Board of Elections, a quasi-state agency funded by the city, is set to roll out a new website in the coming months which will provide New Yorkers with an “electronically assisted way” to fill out a voter registration form and an absentee ballot application, according to BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan, who testified at a budget hearing of the City Council’s Committee on Governmental Operations on Monday. The two electronic forms would still have to be printed and either mailed to the BOE or delivered in person, in accordance with current state law.

Pennsylvania: Supreme Court turns down gerrymander appeal from Pennsylvania’s GOP | Los Angeles Times

The Supreme Court refused Monday to block a new election map for Pennsylvania that gives Democrats a chance to win four or more congressional seats in November. The justices turned down a second and final appeal from Pennsylvania’s Republican leaders, who defended the gerrymandered districts that had given them a steady 13-5 advantage over the Democrats for years. The new map gives Democrats a good chance to win half of the 18 House seats. Last week, they celebrated picking up a Republican seat when Conor Lamb claimed victory in a special election for a seat in southwestern Pennsylvania. Republicans have not conceded that race as final provisional ballots are counted. Lamb and all other candidates will run this fall in districts that have been redrawn.

Washington: Governor Signs Package of Voter Access Bills | Associated Press

Gov. Jay Inslee on Monday signed a package of bills aimed at increasing voter access in Washington state, including a measure to preregister 16- and 17-year-olds and another that allows in-person voter registration to occur the same day of an election. “I’m proud of our state for making it easier to vote, not harder,” Inslee told the crowd of students and other supporters at Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington, where the bill signing ceremony was held. Under one of the measures , starting on July 1, 2019, people can preregister to vote starting at age 16, though they won’t be added to the list of registered voters until the next election at which they’ll be 18.

Canada: Russia online ‘troll farm’ that meddled in U.S. election also targeted Trudeau, Canadian pipelines | The Globe and Mail

The same Russian online troll farm that meddled in the American presidential election has also taken swipes at Canadian targets, including oil infrastructure and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Evidence is embedded in data made publicly available through investigations in the United States, where congressional probes have been examining Russian information campaigns following the 2016 presidential election. One report from a Republican-led committee in the House of Representatives released this month said the St. Petersburg troll factory, members of which now face criminal charges in the U.S., posted online about energy roughly half as often as it did about American presidential politics.

Egypt: Vote reminds many of pre-uprising days | Reuters

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi needs no election campaign. The general-turned-president’s crackdown on challengers and dissent, which critics say surpasses that before Egypt’s 2011 uprising, has already ensured he will win a second term. Central Cairo is nonetheless adorned with banners and billboards proclaiming support for Sisi, who led the overthrow of Egypt’s first freely elected president in 2013 and returned the military establishment to power. Next Monday, seven years after the Arab Spring protests that ousted Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and others in the Middle East, Egypt will once again hold the kind of vote that kept those leaders in power for decades.

Montenegro: Montenegro Seeks To Stare Down Fancy Bear As Election Looms | RFE/RL

Over the last two years, authorities in Montenegro have recorded a sharp rise in cyberattacks, mostly targeting state institutions and media outlets in that aspiring EU state on the Adriatic. With a presidential election looming on April 15, the recent NATO entrant and its 650,000 residents are girding for another possible wave of hacks. Montenegro and other countries in the Balkans fear meddling from Moscow to further what they believe is an expansion of Russian foreign policy. Officials in Podgorica feel their country is especially vulnerable, as the winner of the presidential vote is likely to steer Montenegro through early negotiations on EU accession, a move the Kremlin staunchly opposes.

Russia: OSCE says Russian presidential election lacked real choice | Reuters

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said on Monday there had been no real choice in Russia’s presidential election and complained it had been marked by unfair pressure on critical voices. “Choice without real competition, as we have seen here, is not real choice,” the OSCE said in a statement, adding that restrictions on fundamental freedoms, as well as on candidate registration, had limited the space for political engagement. The OSCE gave its verdict after President Vladimir Putin won 76.69 percent of vote in a landslide re-election victory on Sunday, extending his rule over the world’s largest country for another six years. Putin’s critics, including opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was barred from running in the race, said there had been widespread fraud and that observers had seen people being bussed to polling stations by their own employers.

Turkey: Electoral overhaul sparks boycott calls | Al-Monitor

As fraud allegations over last year’s constitutional referendum continue to simmer, Turkey’s government last week rushed through parliament far-reaching changes to electoral rules, fueling fears over the integrity of upcoming polls and sparking opposition calls for an election boycott. In the April 16, 2017, referendum, which narrowly approved amendments concentrating power in the hands of the president, the Supreme Election…

Pennsylvania: Lack of court action on new Pennsylvania voting map causing concern | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

With Tuesday’s deadline for filing nominating petitions imminent, prospective candidates waiting for courts to take action on Pennsylvania’s radically reconfigured congressional map learned Friday that the wait will continue. By day’s end Friday, neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the U.S. District Court here had decided whether to grant requests from Republican lawmakers who want them to overturn the new congressional map put in place by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ruled that lines drawn in 2011 represented an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander favoring Republicans. Members of both parties and outside experts appeared to be at a loss to explain the courts’ inaction. The delay, at least on the U.S. Supreme Court side, is “quite unusual,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law and political science professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Georgia: Lawmakers mull paper ballot voting system | Associated Press

As Georgia lawmakers consider scrapping electronic voting machines for a system that uses paper ballots, a razor-thin margin in a U.S. House race over 500 miles away in Western Pennsylvania has highlighted a crucial distinction between the two systems: the presence of an auditable paper trail. The proposal would move Georgia from its 16-year-old electronic touchscreen voting system with no paper backup, to either a touchscreen system that prints a paper ballot or paper ballots marked by pencil. Republican Rep. Ed Setzler of Acworth, one of the bill’s primary backers, said it was needed to ensure that election results could be audited if there were claims or evidence of irregularities and to bolster voter confidence. The measure recently passed the House Governmental Affairs Committee and is expected to quickly see a vote before the full House. … A tight U.S. House race in Western Pennsylvania last week was questioned by GOP officials there who said they were looking into alleged voting irregularities after Democrat Conor Lamb declared victory over Republican Rick Saccone in a longtime GOP stronghold that includes four counties in the Pittsburgh area.

National: FEC probes whether NRA got illegal Russian donations | Politico

The Federal Election Commission has launched a preliminary investigation into whether Russian entities gave illegal contributions to the National Rifle Association that were intended to benefit the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election, according to people who were notified of the probe. The inquiry stems in part from a complaint from a liberal advocacy group, the American Democracy Legal Fund, which asked the FEC to look into media reports about links between the rifle association and Russian entities, including a banker with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. A spokesman for the NRA and its lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, which together contributed $30 million to Trump’s presidential campaign, declined to comment on the FEC’s probe.

National: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions | The New York Times

As the upstart voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica prepared to wade into the 2014 American midterm elections, it had a problem. The firm had secured a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, and wooed his political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. But it did not have the data to make its new products work. So the firm harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history. The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Georgia: Bill cuts down on voting hours despite Democrats’ opposition | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A bill advancing in the Georgia Legislature would reduce voting hours in the city of Atlanta and limit early voting on Sundays.
The legislation would force Atlanta’s polls to close at 7 p.m. instead of 8 p.m. and allow voting in advance of Election Day on only one Saturday or Sunday. The House Governmental Affairs Committee approved the legislation, Senate Bill 363, on Wednesday. The committee’s five Democrats opposed the bill, while the committee’s majority Republicans all supported it, though a hand count of “yes” votes wasn’t taken. The bill was filed by Republican Sen. Matt Brass after Democratic Sen. Jen Jordan won a special election in December to represent a district that covers parts of Atlanta and Cobb County.  Voting in Cobb County ended at 7 p.m., an hour earlier than in Atlanta.

Illinois: Security of state voter rolls a concern as primaries begin | Associated Press

With the Illinois primary just days away, state election officials are beefing up cyber defenses and scanning for possible intrusions into voting systems and voter registration rolls. They have good reason to be on guard: Two years ago, Illinois was the lone state known to have its state election system breached in a hacking effort that ultimately targeted 21 states. Hackers believe to be connected to Russia penetrated the state’s voter rolls, viewing data on some 76,000 Illinois voters, although there is no indication any information was changed. Since then, Illinois election officials have added firewalls, installed software designed to prevent intrusions and shifted staffing to focus on the threats. The state has been receiving regular cyber scans from the federal government to identify potential weak spots and has asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment. That assessment is scheduled but will not happen before Tuesday’s second-in the-nation primary.

Minnesota: Citing Russian threat, Secretary of State asking for $1.4 million to update voter registration system | Twin Cities Pioneer Press

Citing national security officials’ warnings that Minnesota’s voter database had already been targeted by elements “at the behest of the Russian government,” the secretary of state is asking for funding to update its statewide registration system. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said he’s been in multiple meetings with Department of Homeland Security officials — including a meeting as late as February — relating to foreign attempts to affect the integrity of Minnesota’s voting system. “They are sobering,” Simon said of the meetings, for which he was recently given “secret” security clearance — meaning, he said, he couldn’t give too many details. In 2016, entities associated with the Russian government targeted 21 states, including Minnesota, national security officials have said. Two of those states — Illinois and Arizona — had their state databases penetrated.

North Carolina: Elections ethics power struggle: Roy Cooper appoints board | News & Observer

Many voters in North Carolina fill in ballots on Election Day, slide them into voting machines, maybe pick up an “I voted” sticker on the way out of the polling place, watch for the results and think it’s all over. But the 2016 elections in North Carolina showed how much can happen after the last ballot is cast. There was a post-election campaign after Democrat Roy Cooper defeated Republican Pat McCrory in a narrow 10,277-vote victory, with voter challenges and recount petitions filed across the state. It wasn’t until a month later that McCrory acknowledged he lost. The monthlong election aftermath from two years ago provides insight into one of the power struggles going on between the Republican-led General Assembly and Cooper. The state elections and ethics board has been in limbo for much of the past year as Cooper has turned to the courts to overturn attempts by lawmakers to have greater sway in who’s appointed to it.

Canada: Supreme Court set to decide whether long-term Canadian expats can vote | Toronto Star

Canada’s top court is set to grapple with whether long-term expats should be allowed to vote, an issue that loomed large in the last federal election in which Justin Trudeau and his Liberals took office. Civil liberties groups, which argue current rules barring the expats from voting are unconstitutional, and Quebec, which supports the federal government’s defence of the restrictions, are among interveners in the closely watched case the Supreme Court of Canada is scheduled to hear on Wednesday. Canadians lose the right to vote after living abroad for more than five years under rules on the books since 1993. However, it was only under the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper that Elections Canada began enforcing the laws.

Egypt: Ahead of contentious vote, Egypt sets sights on “fake news” | Reuters

Mostafa al-Asar’s lawyer said he had barely started work on a documentary critical of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi when police arrested him and charged him with publishing “fake news”. The journalist was detained before he had even begun filming, his lawyer said. The government did not respond to requests for comment. The arrest on Feb. 4 came ahead of a presidential election later this month which Sisi is virtually guaranteed to win. All opposition candidates except one have dropped out citing intimidation, while the remaining challenger has said he supports the president. The election commission says it has been receptive to any complaints and the vote will be fair and transparent.

India: Opposition’s back-to-paper-ballot campaign against electronic voting machines gathers steam | National Herald

Even as Opposition parties explore the feasibility of a united front, a parallel exercise is on to join hands on an issue which they consider to be far more critical to the outcome of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. In focus are the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). Many Opposition parties and voters have serious doubts about the reliability of EVMs. Efforts are on to renew the demand for a return to the old paper ballot system of voting for the next election. A day after the Gorakhpur and Phulpur byelection results were announced, victorious Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav told newsmen: “We won. But the old ballot paper system was much better. It enabled people to vote with much more passion and to express their anger through the ballot box”.

Ireland: Tactile ballot templates to facilitate visually impaired in voting | The Irish Times

People who are blind or visually impaired will be able to vote in the upcoming referendum on the Eighth Amendment without assistance for the first time. The use of new tactile ballot templates at polling stations means thousands of people with limited or no sight will be able to cast their votes in secret in the May referendum. The introduction of these new ballot papers follows the High Court case of Robbie Sinnott who initiated proceedings in 2016 against the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government and the State.

Russia: Police put the squeeze on election observers before vote | The Guardian

Days before Russia’s presidential elections, police are trying to seize documents that give activist observers access to polling stations and a leading elections watchdog has unexpectedly seen its office lease revoked. “You shouldn’t hold this event here or you’ll have trouble,” Roman Udot, a representative for the independent Golos Association elections watchdog, said his landlord was told by police before they ripped up the contract. The “event” was a call centre to field reports of election violations. The government denies interfering. Russia’s short, frustrating and listless presidential campaign is grinding to its inevitable conclusion. Even Vladimir Putin hardly seems enthused, devoting less than two minutes to a final campaign speech in Crimea, the peninsula he annexed from Ukraine in 2014 to domestic acclaim and international condemnation.

Russia: How Russia Meddled in its Own Elections | The Atlantic

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s longest-serving ruler since Joseph Stalin, surprised no one with his landslide re-election on Sunday. While his victory, in which he claimed 73.9 percent of the vote according to state-run exit polls, was a foregone conclusion, the Kremlin was reportedly anxious about turnout, and conducted an elaborate, well-financed get-out-the-vote campaign. For an authoritarian regime in which election results and turnout are pre-ordained, such concerns may seem odd. But even in Russia’s “managed democracy,” appearances still matter, and the Kremlin needed to present believably high levels of support to ensure Putin’s mandate. Shortly after polling centers closed on Sunday night, Putin appeared to be on target to achieve the desired 65 percent turnout. But even more important for Putin is that this election marked the culmination of his nearly two-decades-long project to control information in Russia and manipulate Russian society. Now, Putin has proven beyond any doubt that the Russia he has built is his and his alone.

Venezuela: Opposition groups protest election, demand new vote | AFP

A coalition of Venezuelan opposition groups organized rallies across the country on Saturday to protest May 20 presidential elections it considers fraudulent and to demand “free and transparent” elections at a future date. “The assemblies are a show of resistance against a regime that wants to deny us our rights,” parliamentarian Delsa Solorzano told AFP. “We have to salvage the right to vote freely.” The protests were organized by the Broad Front for a Free Venezuela, which includes the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), dissidents of the leftist Chavist movement, and sectors of civil society.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 12-18 2018

Cyberscoop reported on the move many states and counties are making to paper ballot voting systems. Verified Voting president Marian Schneider is quoted emphasizing “the ability to recover,” from hacking malfunction. “When you talk about voting systems, the way you have the ability to recover is that you have a voter-marked paper ballot, and you have a human process that checks that paper ballot against the software-driven process.” Michael K. Miller of the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage takes a valuable international perspective in dvocating the importance of pre-election planning nd non-partisanship in countering election interference.

Duncan Buell, Richard DeMillo and Candice Hoke posted an extensive op-ed in USA Today recommending  rapid conversion from “paperless touch-screen voting machines to paper ballots, and upgrade states’ and counties’ verification practices to conduct public post-election ballot audits before local election boards certify the 2018 elections.”

An Arkansas judge is weighing whether to block enforcement of a voter ID law that’s nearly identical to a measure struck down by the state’s highest court about four years ago. Judge Alice Gray didn’t say when she would rule on a request to block the law’s enforcement in Arkansas’ May 22 primary.

The Georgia House Governmental Affairs Committee approved a bill that would replace the state’s 16-year-old electronic voting machines with a system that provides a paper backup. While many of the bill’s supporters suggest that the legislation would require paper ballots, voting advocates are concern that language in the bill could allow equipment that counted barcodes rather than marks made by voters. Verified Voting president Marian Schneider said the legislation needs to be clarified to ensure that “human readable ballots” — not bar codes — are the official ballot. The current version of the bill could be interpreted as saying that the bar codes are official because they’re part of the paper ballot. “A bar code is insecure because it’s generated by software,” Schneider said. “A software-created process can be altered by software. Those software-generated items should not control in the case of a discrepancy.”

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper announced he will appoint members to a long-delayed new State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, allowing the board, which has staff but no appointed board, to clear a backlog of work ahead of this year’s elections. Cooper will continue to fight the Republican-mandated changes to the board in court.

Conor Lamb’s razor-thin margin of victory in this week special election has provoked calls for a recount. But, as Buzzfeed points out there is no way to do a meaningful recount of the voting equipment used in the 18t Congressional District. In a Reuters article election experts agreed that the election highlighted the importance of replacing Pennsylvania’s aging voting machines with paper ballots voting systems ahead November’s midterm elections.

With opposition calls to for a boycott of Egypt’s presidential election, The Washington Post considered the impact and effectiveness of election boycotts. And in another election in which the is not in doubt, Russians go to the polls today to elect Vladimir Putin to another six year term.

National: Spooked by election hacking, states are moving to paper ballots | Cyberscoop

Paper ballots may seem like an antiquated voting practice, but hacking fears are now pushing an increasing number of states toward a return to the basics. State legislatures and election directors are heeding warnings from Washington that hackers may tamper with electronic voting systems in the 2018 midterm elections. The U.S. intelligence community has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election and that the Kremlin will try to do so again. On the national level, lawmakers have made several attempts to push legislation aiming to strengthen election cybersecurity through grants to upgrade equipment and to increase cooperation between the federal government and lower jurisdictions. So far, no such legislation has passed either chamber of Congress. Amid all this national attention, a number of states have started to act on their own bolster the integrity of elections they run. With these states, the focus has been on doing away with direct-recording electronic voting machines (DREs) that don’t produce a paper record.

National: How the U.S. can prepare for a major election hack | The Washington Post

Before the 2016 election, at least 21 U.S. states’ registration databases or websites were targeted by hackers and seven states were successfully “compromised,” although there’s no evidence that votes were altered. As U.S. intelligence agencies recently made clear, the risk to voting systems continues in 2018. Foreign actors could target registration records, electronic voting machines or vote tabulations. Because American elections are controlled by individual states that employ a wide array of voting systems, a localized breach is especially feasible. Amplifying the danger is that many Americans will react to vote manipulation somewhere in the United States with doubts about election results everywhere. Even if this interference does not actually change an election outcome, people may use any breach to cast doubt on outcomes they don’t want to believe. This havoc is precisely what Russia wants.

Editorials: We can stop Russian election hackers in 2018 | Duncan Buell, Richard DeMillo and Candice Hoke/USA Today

The first ballots of the 2018 mid-term elections will soon be cast, but many Americans will exercise this constitutional right without much confidence that their votes will be fairly and securely counted. Partisanship in Congress and bureaucratic delays have left voting even more vulnerable to the attacks that top intelligence officials say will accelerate in 2018. Meanwhile, irrefutable evidence has revealed that Russia engaged in a multifaceted attack on the 2016 election through information warfare, and that hackers also scanned or penetrated state election infrastructure in ways that could lead to manipulation of voter registration data — and possibly change vote totals in 2018. We propose two stopgap measures that can be immediately implemented without waiting for funding or new legislation. Cybersecurity experts have repeatedly warned that none of our current voting technologies was designed to withstand the cyberattacks expected in the coming months. This national emergency calls for Americans to act immediately before the voters’ faith in democratic elections is severely undermined. Experts agree there’s time to contain major threats to this year’s elections, but we must rapidly convert from paperless touch-screen voting machines to paper ballots, and upgrade states’ and counties’ verification practices to conduct public post-election ballot audits before local election boards certify the 2018 elections. A post-election audit involves simply checking the computer-generated tabulations against paper ballots to be sure the machine hasn’t been compromised.  

Cybersecurity experts have repeatedly warned that none of our current voting technologies was designed to withstand the cyberattacks expected in the coming months. This national emergency calls for Americans to act immediately before the voters’ faith in democratic elections is severely undermined. Experts agree there’s time to contain major threats to this year’s elections, but we must rapidly convert from paperless touch-screen voting machines to paper ballots, and upgrade states’ and counties’ verification practices to conduct public post-election ballot audits before local election boards certify the 2018 elections. A post-election audit involves simply checking the computer-generated tabulations against paper ballots to be sure the machine hasn’t been compromised.

Arkansas: Judge considers request to block voter ID law | Associated Press

An attorney for a Little Rock man challenging Arkansas’ voter ID law called the measure an end run around a court decision striking down a nearly identical state law four years ago, while attorneys for the state called the provision a proper way to verify a voter’s registration. Pulaski County Circuit Judge Alice Gray didn’t say when she would rule on a request to block the law’s enforcement in Arkansas’ May 22 primary after a day of testimony and arguments from lawyers for the state and the voter challenging the measure, Barry Haas of Little Rock. Early voting for the primary is set to begin May 7.