National: U.S. senators want stiff sanctions to deter Russia election meddling | Reuters

U.S. Republican and Democratic senators will introduce legislation on Wednesday seeking to deter Russia from meddling in U.S. elections by threatening stiff sanctions on its banking, energy and defense industries and sovereign debt. Known as the “Deter Act,” the legislation is the latest effort by U.S. lawmakers to ratchet up pressure on Moscow over what they see as a range of bad behavior, from its aggression in Ukraine and involvement in Syria’s civil war to attempts to influence U.S. elections. The measure will be introduced by Senators Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Republican. They offered a similar measure last year, when it also had bipartisan support but was never brought up for a vote by the Senate’s Republican leaders, who have close ties to President Donald Trump. Trump has gone along with some previous congressional efforts to increase sanctions on Russia, although sometimes reluctantly. According to details of the legislation seen by Reuters, it would require the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to determine, within 30 days of any federal election, whether Russia or any other foreign government, or anyone acting as an agent of that government, had engaged in election interference.

National: 2020 Census likely target of hacking, disinformation campaigns, officials say | The Washington Post

With just a year to go before the 2020 Census, the U.S. government is urgently working to safeguard against hacking and disinformation campaigns as it perfects a plan to count about 330 million people largely online for the first time. Going digital is intended to cut costs. But cybersecurity experts say it may also put the survey at unprecedented risk in a nation embroiled in fallout from Russian interference in the 2016 election. Any outside attempt to discredit or manipulate the decennial survey could drive down response rates, imperiling the integrity of data that help determine a decade’s worth of federal funding, congressional apportionment and redistricting throughout the country. “Just as with voting, completing the census is a powerful exercise in our democracy, and there are always people who want to prevent others from exercising their power,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality and an expert on the census. “I think there will be lots of attempts. We should be concerned.”

National: American Security Requires a Cyber-Savvy Congress | The National Interest

On March 13, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden submitted a bipartisan letter to the Senate sergeant-at-arms asking for an annual report tallying the number of times Senate computers have been hacked. The letter also requests the SAA adopt a policy of informing Senate leadership within five days of any new data breaches that occur. Cotton and Wyden should be lauded for requesting greater clarity regarding government cybersecurity. Yet this important and reasonable petition reveals an unfortunate reality: We expect our lawmakers to enact policy protecting our nation from cyberattacks when they don’t even know whether their own computers have been hacked. For the sake of national security, this must change. Government agencies, in general, are legally required to disclose breaches, but Congress is under no similar obligation. According to the letter, the last time there was a publicly disclosed report of a congressional data breach was in 2009. Indeed, the two examples of cyberattacks on Senate computers that Cotton and Wyden cite (one against former Virginia representative Frank Wolf in 2006 and one against former Florida senator Bill Nelson in 2009) are both at least a decade old. But a lack of data for the years since then doesn’t mean that hackers haven’t been active. In fact, in 2018, both the Democratic National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee lost emails in data breaches. Moreover, the Department of Defense wards off approximately thirty-six million attempted data breaches each day. 

Georgia: Paulding’s Holden leading state election officials group preparing for new voting system | mdjonline

Paulding’s election supervisor will help lead a new statewide election workers organization as they learn to operate a new electronic voting system by the 2020 presidential election. Deidre Holden will join with Athens-Clarke County elections director Charlotte Sosebee to lead the new Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials after the merger of two long-standing groups whose members were involved in conducting Georgia elections for half a century. The two groups, the Voter Registrars Association of Georgia and the Georgia Election Officials Association, worked for years to merge after their members increasingly were assigned the same duties in recent decades, Holden said. The new group is forming as election officials statewide begin training to operate the new $150 million system of ballot-marking devices the Georgia General Assembly approved this year. Paulding’s elections office will use the new machines in the Dallas and Hiram municipal elections in November as part of a pilot program, Holden said.

Louisiana: Secretary of state will rent early-voting machines for fall election | Associated Press

Louisiana’s secretary of state told lawmakers Tuesday that he hopes to restart efforts to replace thousands of voting machines this summer, after the last effort was derailed by allegations of improper bid handling. Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, who oversees state elections, said the voting machine replacement work won’t be complete for the fall election, so his office will spend $2 million renting temporary machines. Ardoin told the House Appropriations Committee his office will rent early-voting machines for the October and November elections, when all of Louisiana’s statewide and legislative positions are on the ballot. The office will use spare parts to make sure the decade-old Election Day voting machines are running properly. “Because the last (bid process) didn’t work out so well, we’re working very hard to maneuver to make sure that we are settled for the fall election,” Ardoin said. A multimillion-dollar contract award to replace Louisiana’s voting machines was scrapped in October after the state’s chief procurement officer said the secretary of state’s office didn’t follow legal requirements in choosing the winning vendor, Dominion Voting Systems.

Minnesota: Election security bill in limbo | KARE

Three months into the 2019 legislative session, lawmakers still haven’t released federal funds set aside for election security. As part of the Help America Vote Act or HAVA, Congress allotted $6.6 million to Minnesota to combat cyber threats and other attacks against the state’s elections infrastructure. As of the first week in April, Minnesota is the only state in the nation to leave the money on the table, unspent. “We want to re-secure our voter registration data base. It’s the spine of the system,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told KARE. “It does more than just voter registration. It does a lot of things in the election system and it needs to be substantially recoded and fortified against attacks.” We now know that Russian operatives tried to hack into Minnesota’s elections Internet framework in 2016. They were able to breach the system, but unable to alter any records or processes. Secretary Simon wants to use the money to modernize the registration system, build a voter database backup, add real-time monitoring of cyber threats, and create a new position in his office to help local elections officials with security issues. Federal officials made many of these recommendations after a site visit to Minnesota last year. But Simon can’t take any of these actions without first getting permission from the legislature. That hasn’t happened yet.

New York: Budget allocates $24.7M to improve voting process — publicly funded elections delayed | The Legislative Gazette

Election reformers are seeing mixed results in the new state budget passed this week. On one hand, New Yorkers will now be able to vote before Election Day, register to vote online, and polls will open earlier for upstate primaries. Additionally, employers will be required to give all workers three hours of paid time off to vote, and with a new $14.7 million allocation, voters will be able to sign in at polling places using an electronic sign-in book. The e-poll books keep track of data such as voter registration, voting history and verification and identification of voters. This will bring the state’s system up to date with 21st century technology. More than half of the states in the U.S. use electronic polling books already. On the other hand, many good-government groups and activists are angry that the budget did not establish a system of publicly financed campaigns that rely on a small-donor matching system, coupled with lowered contribution limits. Instead, a commission will study the feasibility of such a system for legislative and statewide offices, and will issue a report in December. Proposed by the Fair Elections for New York campaign, a small-donor matching system would give a voice to New Yorkers who cannot afford to donate large sums of money to political candidates. It is also seen as a system that allows more people to run for political office.

India: Misinformation Is Endangering India’s Election | Nextgov

In the days following a suicide bombing against Indian security forces in Kashmir this year, a message began circulating in WhatsApp groups across the country. It claimed that a leader of the Congress Party, the national opposition, had promised a large sum of money to the attacker’s family, and to free other “terrorists” and “stone pelters” from prison, if the state voted for Congress in upcoming parliamentary elections. The message was posted to dozens of WhatsApp groups that appeared to promote Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, and seemed aimed at painting the BJP’s main national challenger as being soft on militancy in Kashmir, which remains contested between India and Pakistan, just as the two countries seemed to be on the brink of war. The claim, however, was fake. No member of Congress, at either a national or a state level, had made any such statement. Yet delivered in the run-up to the election, and having spread with remarkable speed, that message offered a window into a worsening problem here.

Indonesia: The mind-boggling challenge of Indonesia’s election logistics | The Interpreter

How do you organise free and fair elections in a sprawling developing country beset by political corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and organisational inefficiency? For Indonesia – and its 193 million voters – the answer lies in the vast number of polling stations, the use of a metal nail (not a pen or a machine) for voting, 1.6 million bottles of halal certified ink and the practice of counting votes in public. On April 17, the world’s third most populous democracy is holding simultaneous presidential and legislative elections for the first time. It will be world’s biggest direct presidential elections (because the US uses an electoral college) and one of the most complicated single-day elections in global history. By contrast, India, which is the world’s biggest democracy, is conducting its parliamentary elections through a rolling regional process over six weeks in April and May. As the Lowy Institute’s new infographic highlights, the scale of Indonesia’s electoral process is mind-boggling, with five separate elections at once, for the president, both houses of parliament, provincial legislatures and district/city councils. Altogether, there are more than 245,000 candidates running for more than 20,000 national and local legislative seats across hundreds of islands, in addition to the headline contest between President Joko Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto.

Israel: Election bots show “how the political game has changed” | Verdict

The discovery of Israel election bots designed to give the illusion of support for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of elections next week is the latest example of how cybersecurity has crossed over into the political realm, according to one cybersecurity expert. The Israel election bots, which were uncovered by cyber watchdog the Big Bots Project, identified hundreds of fake Twitter accounts responsible for over 130,000 tweets said to be spreading disinformation about Netanyahu’s opponents. It is, according to Corin Imai, senior security advisor at DomainTools, the latest example of how cybersecurity concerns are posing a threat to democracy. “This campaign is yet the latest demonstration of how the political game has changed,” she said. “Cybersecurity is no longer a matter of protecting enterprises’ digital assets and data, but a responsibility towards the preservation of the democratic process.

Turkey: Erdogan’s party challenges election results after apparent defeat in Turkey’s cities | The Washington Post

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party said Tuesday that it had submitted challenges to election results that showed its candidates had been defeated in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey’s largest cities, in local elections two days earlier that dealt a rare setback to Erdogan at the ballot box. The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has repeatedly prevailed in elections since 2002 and was the leading vote-getter on Sunday. But its losses in major cities — including Istanbul, Turkey’s financial capital — were a significant symbolic defeat for Erdogan and threatened to weaken his powerful party machine, analysts said. The election came in the midst of an economic downturn that had focused voter anger on Erdogan’s handling of the crisis, analysts said. Urban voters may have also bristled at his caustic campaign rhetoric, they added, and his frequent attempts to link his political opponents to terrorism. The AKP challenged vote tallies in all of Istanbul’s 39 districts, where Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayoral candidate from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, was leading by about 25,000 votes.