National: F.B.I. Warns of Russian Interference in 2020 Race and Boosts Counterintelligence Operations | The New York Times

The F.B.I. director warned anew on Friday about Russia’s continued meddling in American elections, calling it a “significant counterintelligence threat.” The bureau has shifted additional agents and analysts to shore up defenses against foreign interference, according to a senior F.B.I. official. The Trump administration has come to see that Russia’s influence operations have morphed into…

New York: Amid Public Outrage, New York City Board Of Elections Pulls Private Voter Records From Internet | CBS

After massive public backlash, and the possibility for legal backlash as well, the New York City Board of Elections has quickly wiped the public’s private information from the internet. Voter rolls listing full names, home addresses that included apartment numbers, and party affiliations for all 4.6 million registered voters in New York City were dumped on the BOE’s website. On Tuesday, the board suddenly decided to remove that information from its site after beginning the information dump in February. Executive director Michael Ryan spoke to CBS2’s Marcia Kramer about the privacy scandal and admitted the media firestorm was responsible for the decision to end the short-sighted plan. “Yes we heard it. Yes we took it down. Do I think if someone was really looking to find somebody they’d go to the ad list books at the Boards of Elections? No I don’t quite frankly,” Ryan said defiantly.

National: FBI chief: Russia upping meddling efforts ahead of 2020, midterms a ‘dress rehearsal’ | The Hill

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Friday that the 2018 midterm elections served as a “dress rehearsal” for Russia’s election interference efforts slated to be aimed at the 2020 presidential election. Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, the FBI director said that Russian operatives and other foreign agents are “adapting” to the efforts the U.S. intelligence community is taking to secure America’s election systems. “Well, I think — on the one hand I think enormous strides have been made since 2016 by all the different federal agencies, state and local election officials, the social media companies, etc.,” Wray said. “But I think we recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game. And so we’re very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020,” he added. One area Wray pointed to where the FBI has seen improvement is in cooperation with social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook, where Russian election meddling was centered in 2016.

National: As security officials prepare for Russian attack on 2020 presidential race, Trump and aides play down threat | The Washington Post

In recent months, U.S. national security officials have been preparing for Russian interference in the 2020 presidential race by tracking cyber threats, sharing intelligence about foreign disinformation efforts with social media companies and helping state election officials protect their systems against foreign manipulation. But these actions are strikingly at odds with statements from President Trump, who has rebuffed warnings from his senior aides about Russia and sought to play down that country’s potential to influence American politics. The president’s rhetoric and lack of focus on election security has made it tougher for government officials to implement a more comprehensive approach to preserving the integrity of the electoral process, current and former officials said. Officials insist that they have made progress since 2016 in hardening defenses. And top security officials, including the director of national intelligence, say the president has given them “full support” in their efforts to counter malign activities. But some analysts worry that by not sending a clear, public signal that he understands the threat foreign interference poses, Trump is inviting more of it. In the past week, Justice Department prosecutors indicated that Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 election are part of a long-term strategy that the United States continues to confront. 

National: Menendez calls for $2.5B to help strengthen election systems | NJTV

Brandishing a copy of the Mueller Report, Sen. Bob Menendez emphasized its findings about election security during the last presidential campaign and election and proposed spending $2.5 billion over 10 years to make the system more resilient. “The Russian government carried out a sweeping and systematic attack on the 2016 election and the Trump campaign actively welcomed it. Second, the president repeatedly tried to undermine and obstruct the special counsel’s investigation into that interference,” Menendez said. Menendez argued that the obstruction continues. This weekend, in fact, President Donald Trump continued to assail the Mueller Report as a political hoax. “The radical, liberal Democrats put all their hopes behind their ‘collusion delusion’, which has now been totally exposed to the world as a complete and total fraud,” Trump said on April 27 in Wisconsin. Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney warned White House officials not to mention Russian election activity to the president, The New York Times reported, because Trump believes it delegitimizes his election victory. But Menendez says the U.S. election system remains vulnerable to future attacks — noting that Mueller’s report underscored previous intel that Russians hacked 21 state elections systems, not including New Jersey’s and installed malware at a voting technology company’s computer network. Sen. Marco Rubio told The New York Times that Russian hackers could have tampered with rolls of registered voters in one Florida county. The FBI fully expects renewed cyberattacks.

National: U.S. Cyber Command has shifted its definition of success | CyberScoop

U.S. Cyber Command is shifting the way it measures success from solely military outcomes to how the command enables other government agencies to defend against foreign offensive cyber threats. Brig. Gen. Timothy Haugh, who is in charge of Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force, said on Tuesday at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council that success is “not necessarily [about] the department’s outcome,” but is instead about “how can we enable our international partners [and] our domestic partners in industry to be able to defend those things that are critical to our nation’s success.” Haugh said Cyber Command is doing its job right if agencies are taking their own actions: State Department issuing démarches, Department of Homeland Security releasing alerts, and Treasury Department announcing sanctions “based off of information that is derived from our operations.” In the past, Haugh said he believes that these outcomes may not have been considered as wins. This shift in benchmarking comes amid newfound leeway at the Department of Defense to launch offensive cyber measures. Last year, President Donald Trump issued a revamp to the White House’s offensive cyber policy, which federal Chief Information Security Officer Grant Schneider last week deemed an “operational success.”

National: Graham challenges Kushner’s bid to downplay Russia interference | The Washington Post

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham on Sunday pushed back against White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s recent downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election, calling Moscow’s actions a “big deal” deserving of new sanctions immediately. Still, the South Carolina Republican insisted President Trump had done nothing wrong, citing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s refusal to charge Trump with either conspiracy or obstruction of justice in the Russia probe. “I think the idea that this president obstructed justice is absurd,” Graham, a fierce Trump ally, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” “I can’t think of one thing that President Trump did to stop Mueller from doing his job. . . . I’ve heard all I need to really know.” During the interview, however, Graham challenged the assertion by Trump’s son-in-law in a Time magazine interview on Tuesday that Russia’s bid to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor amounted to a “couple of Facebook ads” — and that Mueller’s investigation was more damaging to the country than the Russian effort. 

Florida: Russian Hackers Were ‘In a Position’ to Alter Florida Voter Rolls, Rubio Confirms | The New York Times

It was the day before the 2016 presidential election, and at the Volusia County elections office, near Florida’s Space Coast, workers were so busy that they had fallen behind on their correspondence. Lisa Lewis, the supervisor of elections, stumbled on an important email sent to her and three others in the office, by then a week old, that appeared to be from VR Systems, the vendor that sells electronic voter list equipment to nearly every county in the state. “Please take a look at the instructions for our modernised products,” it said, using British spelling and offering an attachment. Something about the email seemed off. “It was from Gmail,” Ms. Lewis said. “They don’t have Gmail.” Ms. Lewis, it turned out, was right to be suspicious. Though it had VR Systems’ distinctive logo, with a red V and a blue R, the email contained a malicious Trojan virus, and it originated not from the elections vendor but from the Russian military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U. The email had been sent to 120 elections email accounts across Florida. Also buried in Ms. Lewis’s inbox was a warning from VR’s chief operating officer, flagging the dangerous spearphishing attempt and warning all his customers not to click on it. But, it now appears, someone did. Slipped into the long-anticipated special counsel report on Russian interference in the 2016 election last week was a single sentence that caused a stir throughout the state and raised new questions about the vulnerability of the nation’s electoral systems.

Georgia: Challenge to Georgia election system faces first court test | Associated Press

A sweeping lawsuit challenging the way Georgia elections are run is being put to an initial test as a federal judge considers a request by state election officials to toss it out. The lawsuit was filed weeks after Republican Brian Kemp narrowly beat Democrat Stacey Abrams in a governor’s race that focused national scrutiny on Georgia’s outdated voting machines and on allegations of voter suppression by Kemp, who was the state’s top election official during the race. Kemp has adamantly denied allegations of wrongdoing. He signed legislation earlier this month that includes specifications for a new voting system , which the current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, says he’ll implement in time for the 2020 election cycle. The lawsuit accuses the secretary of state and election board members of mismanaging the 2018 election in ways that deprived some citizens, particularly low-income people and minorities, of their constitutional right to vote. It seeks substantial reforms and asks that Georgia be required to get a federal judge’s approval before changing voting rules.

Minnesota: Senators skip cybersecurity hearing | Minnesota Lawyer

Election cybersecurity, once described as one of the lightest legislative lifts of 2019, has devolved into a stubborn controversy that some Democrats worry foreshadows turbulence ahead as this year’s Capitol session enters the home stretch. It boils down to a simple unanswered question: How much of $6.6 million in Help America Vote Act funds, which the federal government granted Minnesota last year, should go to Secretary of State Steve Simon to shore up the state’s election cyber-defenses? The two chambers have quite different answers. On Feb. 21, the DFL-led House voted 105-23 to approve House File 14, with many Republicans joining the Democrats. That bill appropriates the full $6.6 million. On Feb. 28, the Senate voted 35-32 along party lines to give Simon access to only $1.5 million of the grant — the same amount included in last year’s vetoed Omnibus Prime supplemental finance bill. The discrepancy sent the HF14 to a joint House-Senate conference committee to iron out the differences. On Tuesday, for the second time since March 21, Senate Republicans — led by conference committee co-chair Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake — skipped a HAVA hearing. The meeting went ahead anyway. Democrats — including three Senate DFLers who aren’t conferees — heard testimony from Simon and former Cook County, Ill., election director Noah Praetz. But with no Senate Republicans on hand to continue negotiations or vote on a compromise, the issue remains unresolved.

New York: Public Records: Personal Information on New York City Voters Is Now Available for All to See | The New York Times

Are you registered to vote in New York City? If so, then anyone can find out your party affiliation, full name and home address down to the apartment number — all with a few mouse clicks. The city’s Board of Elections recently posted its voter enrollment lists to its website, a massive upload of thousands of pages, covered in tiny all-caps letters, that offer a district-by-district breakdown of voters sorted by party and street name — one line for each of the 4.6 million active registered voters. City officials said that the information was already public record, and that a new forum did not change its availability. But the move raised alarms among privacy advocates and some election experts, who said the ease of access could play into the hands of mail scammers, internet trolls and domestic violence perpetrators. It even drew oblique criticism from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, whose office emphasized the need for digital privacy. “The New York City Board of Elections’ decision was theirs to make, but we believe sensitive voter information should always be protected,” Caitlin Girouard, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, said in a statement. She added, “When it comes to the current administration, we need to be extra vigilant to ensure New Yorkers’ information isn’t being used for politically motivated ill will.”

North Carolina: Deferment on voting machines sought | Morganton News Herald

Things seem to be up in the air on new voting machines in Burke County, as well as other places in the state, that are required by state law. A resolution the Burke County Board of Elections passed earlier this month is asking the state General Assembly to delay requiring the voting machines used here to be decertified and new equipment to be purchased. Burke County currently uses touch-screen voting machines (direct-recording electronic voting machines) that have a paper trail. Current state law requires 22 counties, including Burke, to have their DRE voting systems decertified, which would force those counties to buy new voting equipment that use paper ballots. The law sets a deadline of Dec. 1, 2019, to decertify the type of voting equipment that Burke County uses, the resolution says. The local elections board resolution, dated April 9 and signed by all five Burke County elections board members, is requesting the state legislature vote to support deferring the decertification of its election voting machines until 2022. N.C. House Rep. Julia Howard, (R-District 77), introduced House Bill 851 on April 16 that would delay decertification until Dec. 1, 2021. The proposed bill was referred to the House committee on elections and ethics law on April 18. If it is approved in that committee, it will move to the rules, calendar and operations of the House. A similar bill — House Bill 502 — was introduced in the state House of Representatives on March 27 but it would only be for Alamance and Guilford counties. That local bill was referred on April 1 to the same committee as House Bill 851.

Australia: Federal election 2019: why can’t we just vote online? | Crikey

Every time election season comes around, the same question crops up again and again: why can’t we just vote online? We can shop, order takeaway and request an Uber from our phones; why can’t we vote over the internet as well? The main reason: maintaining the security and integrity of elections is actually a lot more complicated than it seems. But let’s take a closer look. While we can secure things like online banking to a reasonable degree, our elections are based on the principle of anonymity and this makes it far more challenging to protect them. Our online banking systems permanently record how much people spend and where, so that we can verify whether our balances are correct. But a record of each person’s vote would be extremely limiting to democracy because it would open up the door to peer pressure and coercion. This could stop people from truly expressing their democratic will. The need to keep elections anonymous brings up some major problems: without records, how can we ensure that the final vote tally is an accurate representation of what the people want? How do we know that the result hasn’t been meddled with by a political party or a foreign power? In paper-based voting systems, we rely on simplicity and having observers from each side at every step of the process. This has been relatively effective at preventing large-scale compromises and errors. When we use electronic and internet-based voting systems, we can’t see what’s actually going on inside the computers and servers, and the vast majority of the electorate doesn’t have the specific knowledge to understand the technical processes that underlie these systems. Electronic and internet-based systems also open up the possibility for widespread election tampering that could slip by undetected, corrupting the entire system. This isn’t feasible in a paper-based election because it would require collusion between far too many people, which would surely be discovered.

Canada: Liberals, Conservatives and NDP endorse global pledge against fraudulent campaign tactics | The Globe and Mail

Canada’s three main parties are signing on to a global pledge against the use of fake news and digital dirty tricks in advance of the October federal election campaign. A former head of NATO met with MPs and government officials on Monday on Parliament Hill to gather signatures for an “election integrity” pledge that started in the European Union and is now being promoted in Canada and the United States. Signatories agree to reject the increasingly sophisticated tools that can be used to mislead voters during an election. That list includes “deep fakes,” an artificial-intelligence technology based on doctoring video and audio in ways that produce believable, yet fake, clips of politicians appearing to say something that they never did. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said it is only a matter of time before voters are faced with fraudulent videos that are nearly impossible to distinguish from reality. “In a couple of years, you’ll have a perfect technology where you’re not able to identify with your own eyes and ears who is the fake and who is the true edition of a political leader,” he said. “You can imagine if a deep-fake video, for instance, is published a couple of days before an important election [what] damaging effect it could have.”

India: Opposition parties take electronic voting machine woes to Election Commission | The Hindu

Opposition parties on Saturday approached the Election Commission alleging the display of party name only under the BJP symbol on EVMs during a mock poll in West Bengal’s Barrackpore constituency. However the poll panel has maintained that the same insignia was used for the party in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. A delegation comprising senior Congress leaders Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Ahmed Patel and Trinamool Congress’ Dinesh Trivedi and Derek O’Brien met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora and demanded that either all such EVMs be removed from the remaining phases of elections or the names of other parties be added too. The EVMs display the party symbols, name of the candidates and their photographs. “On EVMs, the letters ‘BJP’ are visible under the party’s symbol. No other party’s name is there. Either remove all machines which mention the BJP clearly or all other parties’ name should be added in all such machines. Till then the use of these machines has to be stopped,” Mr. Singhvi told reporters after meeting the CEC.

Philippines: Voting machines to service more voters in 2019 polls | Rappler

Each vote-counting machine (VCM) will service more voters in the May 13 polls, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) said Friday, April 26. The maximum number of voters that can use each VCM is now 1,000. In the 2016 elections, the maximum was 800 voters per VCM. In a DZMM interview, Comelec Spokesman James Jimenez explained that the number of registered voters has risen to 61 million this year from 54 million in 2016. Jimenez said the number of VCMs in the Comelec’s custody, however, stayed at 92,000. “Unfortunately hindi sumabay ang bilang ng makina natin. Ang bilang ng makina natin, ganoon pa rin. So ang ginawa ng Comelec, tinaasan ‘yung dami ng taong gagamit ng bawat makina,” Jimenez said. (Unfortunately, the number of machines was not able to keep up. The number of machines stayed the same. So the Comelec increased the number of people who will use each machine.)