Yearly Archives: 2019

While House Democrats are haggling over whether to consider impeachment of President Donald Trump, Senate Democrats are focusing on a different angle in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s report — securing future elections from foreign interference. Democrats have tried to pass several election security bills in recent weeks only to have them blocked by Republicans, who say they are partisan or unnecessary. The federal government has stepped up its efforts to secure elections since Russians intervened in the 2016 presidential election, but Democrats say much more is needed, given ongoing threats from Russia and other countries. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has seethed in response to criticism over the issue, including some Democrats’ new moniker for him: “Moscow Mitch.” In an angry floor speech on Monday, he noted that Congress has already passed some bills on the subject, including ones that give money to the states to try to fix security problems. McConnell also left the door open to additional action, saying “I’m sure all of us will be open to discussing further steps.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted that Democrats’ “relentless pushing” will work. “We’re forcing his hand,” Schumer said. The top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, said Thursday that he’s “much more optimistic than even 10 days ago” that the Senate will ultimately pass something on election security. Warner said he believes that in his home state, at least, the issue “has broken through” with voters more than other aspects of Mueller’s probe. But action will have to wait until at least September, with senators having scattered from Washington for the summer recess.

Arkansas: Official doubtful on state election aid | Dale Ellis/Arkansas Democrat & Gazette

The announcement of money from the state for counties to purchase new voting equipment has left a Jefferson County election commissioner less than enthusiastic. Jefferson County Election Commissioner Stu Soffer says the county has no money to meet the matching requirement. “We do not see a light at the end of the tunnel on new voting equipment,” Soffer said. On Thursday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced that $8.24 million had been provided to the secretary of state’s office to allow counties to improve voting equipment, programming and maintenance. A day earlier, during a meeting at the Arkansas Association of Counties, Kurt Naumann, director of administration and legislative affairs in the secretary of state’s office, told several dozen county officials that the office expected to receive these funds in mid-August from the state Department of Finance and Administration.

Connecticut: More money needed to improve Connecticut election security | Ana Radelat/CTMirror

Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill and many of her peers across the nation are dismayed that Congress will break for summer recess without doing more to prevent foreign interference in U.S. elections. “We were quite shocked when we heard Congress would not go forward with any assistance,” she said. Merrill and other state election officials have been making the case for months that the nation’s electoral system needs to bolster its defenses against hacking and meddling in other ways, including disinformation campaigns on social media, by Russia or other foreign powers. They have been joined in their calls for increased protections by congressional Democrats. Those calls grew louder after last week’s testimony by special counsel Robert Mueller, who told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that the Russians and others were meddling in U.S. elections “as we sit here.” Despite the growing concerns, there’s been little action by Congress on the issue, mainly because the Senate does not want to consider any voting security bills. The issue flared up last week after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blocked bills aimed at protecting the electoral system, a move that prompted detractors to dub him “Moscow Mitch.”

Illinois: 3 years after Russian hackers tapped Illinois voter database, officials spending millions to safeguard 2020 election | Rick Pearson/Chicago Tribune

Three years after Illinois’ voter registration database was infiltrated by Russian hackers, Illinois and local officials are spending millions to upgrade the cyber defenses protecting voters and their ballots leading up to the 2020 election. “It’s gone from being among the concerns to the paramount concern,” said Jim Allen, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. “Now, every election official across the country is engaged in some level of a security program.” Efforts to prevent foreign hacking range from hiring internet security specialists to, in the case of Chicago and Cook County, making plans to buy new polling machines. The June 2016 breach of the state’s voter database remains the warning sign for election system vulnerability, with national security experts now saying all 50 states had been targeted for Russian intrusion. At least 21 states reported being contacted by addresses associated with Russia, largely by scanning public websites, but Illinois’ data breach was the most significant.

Maryland: National Federation of the Blind sues State Board of Elections over ballot privacy | Danielle E. Gaines/WTOP

A group of Maryland voters is suing the state of Maryland, alleging that state policies require them to cast a segregated ballot. The National Federation of the Blind, its Maryland affiliate and three blind registered Maryland voters — Marie Cobb, Ruth Sager and Joel Zimba — filed a lawsuit against the Maryland State Board of Elections in U.S. District Court on Thursday. The lawsuit alleges the elections board is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws by maintaining a segregated system of voting that denies blind voters their right to a secret ballot and an equal voting experience. At issue are the state’s policies for using ExpressVote ballot-marking devices – which can allow voters who are blind or have motor disabilities to use headphones, magnification, touchscreens and other features to independently cast ballots. The machines do not record votes directly but mark a paper ballot that is printed and scanned. ExpressVote paper ballots are a different size and shape than paper ballots filled out by hand, making those votes cast by Marylanders with disabilities immediately identifiable, advocates say.

Editorials: North Carolina should require that all voting machines produce a clear ballot | Raleigh News & Observer

t seems obvious that when North Carolina voters cast their vote they should see a paper ballot showing their selections. But one-third of North Carolina counties — including Mecklenburg, but not any in the Triangle — are still using touchscreen voting machines that leave the recorded vote unclear to the voter and vulnerable to outside manipulation. The General Assembly recognized those weaknesses in 2013 when it passed a law that will require all voting machines used in the 2020 election and beyond to generate a paper ballot. But this being North Carolina and the subject being voting, this basic safeguard is turning into a dispute. For counties that still want to use touchscreen technology, the board must certify which voting machines counties can purchase that will meet the paper ballot requirement. The five-member State Board of Elections is temporarily split between two Republicans and two Democrats because of last week’s resignation by former Board Chairman Bob Cordle, a Democrat. The two Republican members want to approve a touchscreen machine that generates a paper ballot that accompanies each selected candidate’s name with a bar code that is read by an electronic tabulator. The two Democrats want all voting machines to generate a paper ballot with “human-readable marks,” such as a filled-in bubble. The board will vote on the requirements at its next meeting on Aug. 23.

Tennessee: State hits roadblock requiring paper trail voting | Kimberlee Kruesi/Associated Press

As advocates push nationally for states to increase voting security, Tennessee election officials who are trying to win approval for voting machines that produce a paper record have hit a roadblock. A proposal by the state Election Commission for all future voting machines to be capable of producing some sort of paper trail was halted when a surprise legal opinion emerged from the GOP-controlled Legislature’s legal team. The opinion, written on behalf of state Republican Sen. Ken Yager, contests the commission’s process on how it certifies voting machines. Fallout from the opinion has once again tempered attempts to make sweeping changes to Tennessee’s voting systems, which Republican leaders have resisted: They point not only to the importance of allowing local experts decide what is best but also to the significant expense of replacing voting machines statewide. “When it comes to elections, we need to do it the right way or we’ll be buying ourselves a lot of headaches,” Yager said in a Friday phone interview. Democrats have voiced concerns about the lack of paper trail requirements, as have cybersecurity experts, who have criticized Tennessee as one of 12 states that does not require electronic voting machines to print out hand-marked paper ballots. That can leave election results vulnerable to untraceable manipulation by hackers.

Texas: How an election security push is running aground in Texas | Eric Geller/Politico

Election officials across the country are spending millions of dollars to replace their insecure voting machines ahead of the 2020 election. But America’s patchwork voting system is a long way from being secure. To understand why, take a look at Texas. More than a quarter of the state’s 254 counties are sticking with paperless voting machines that cybersecurity experts and intelligence officials have condemned as vulnerable to hacking, according to an extensive, first-of-its-kind POLITICO survey of state and local election offices. At least 14 of them are even buying new paperless machines as they replace devices that nearing 20 years old. In the nation’s second-largest state, the forces impeding the effort to secure the machinery of democracy are the same ones stalling this push for paper ballots nationwide. They include a lack of money, an absence of leadership from above, and a shortage of basic cybersecurity knowledge among the local election officials who make the technology decisions in much of the country.

Washington: Key test for Washington state as Tuesday’s primary features new elections system, same-day registration | Joseph O’Sullivan/The Seattle Times

Substantial new changes to Washington’s elections system face a key test this week, as voters around the state cast ballots in Tuesday’s primary. Washington has adopted same-day voter registration, which allows eligible citizens to register and receive a ballot up until 8 p.m. Tuesday, the end of the election period. And elections officials are deploying a new, statewide voter-management system that has had a rocky rollout in some counties. Known as VoteWA, it is expected to make elections more secure, reduce the risk of fraud and give many counties an upgrade in their elections capabilities. At the root of the new system is a statewide voter database that is updated in real time. So if someone wants to register to vote in King County, for instance, elections workers should be able to immediately determine whether that person has already cast a ballot elsewhere in the state. The system’s data is also exported to create ballots, voter-registration cards and other materials provided to voters. The state’s actual vote-tabulation machines are separate from VoteWA and not connected to the internet, and thus not affected by any potential VoteWA issues.

Namibia: Electoral Commission Postpones Electronic Voting Machine Hacking Challenge | Informanté

The Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) has postponed the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) hacking challenge that was scheduled to take place later today. Vikitoria Hango, Corporate Communications Officer of the Electoral Commission of Namibia said the event is called off following a communication from majority of members of the Political Parties Liaison Committee (PLC) who requested the ECN to postpone the EVM hacking challenge date to allow political parties’ sufficient time to prepare for the session. Hango said the political parties have raised a number of concerns with regard to the credibility and integrity of the EVM both to the Commission and various communication platforms such as newspapers and social media. Political parties allege that the EVMs can be hacked to store results other than the choice of voters and that it can be tampered with to favour a particular candidate or political party by altering the results stored in the EVMs after the polls.

National: Inside the DEF CON hacker conference’s election security-focused Voting Village | Joe Uchill/Axios

The DEF CON hacker conference’s Voting Village event has become a testing ground for our national debate over voting security, referenced by Senate reports, several congressmen and even a presidential candidate (albeit incorrectly, see below). This year’s version, happening next week, comes with some upgrades. The big picture: Now in its third year, the event is traditionally one of the only places where many security researchers get a chance to audit the security of election systems.

Background: Voting Village burst onto the scene in 2017, when it took hackers only a matter of minutes to discover serious problems with machines. That was despite it being the first time many of the hackers had seen the systems.

National: Schumer predicts McConnell will take up election security | Burgess Everett/Politico

Mitch McConnell rarely budges in the face of political pressure. But Chuck Schumer thinks election security is an exception. The Senate minority leader predicted on Thursday that the majority leader will buckle and take up federal election security, a once-bipartisan issue. But though Democrats have continued their push in the House and Senate, McConnell (R-Ky.) has thus far resisted. “I predict that the pressure will continue to mount on Republican senators, especially Leader McConnell, and they will be forced to join us and take meaningful action on election security this fall,” Schumer said. “My prediction is our relentless push is going to produce results.” Though McConnell rarely rethinks opposition to legislation, he did allow criminal justice reform legislation on the Senate floor last year that he initially declined to take up. But that pressure came from President Donald Trump, not the party trying to oust him as majority leader.

National: DARPA to Bring its Smart Ballot Boxes to DEF CON for Hacking | Kelly Jackson Higgins/Dark Reading

US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) researchers will set up three new smart electronic ballot-box prototypes at DEF CON’s famed Voting Village next week in Las Vegas, but they won’t be challenging hackers at the convention to crack them: They’ll be helping them do so. “We are providing the source code specifications, tests, and actually even providing participants at DEF CON with an easy way of actually putting their own malicious software into [the devices],” explains Daniel Zimmerman, principal researcher with Galois, a DARPA contractor working on the project. “We’re not daring them but actually helping them break this.” DARPA’s smart ballot box is the Defense Department agency’s prototype, featuring a secure, open source hardware platform that could be used not only in voting platforms, but also in military systems. It’s part of a broader DARPA project called System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH), which is developing hardware security architectures and tools that are better protected from hardware vulnerabilities exploited in software. DARPA ultimately hopes to build secure chip-level processors that thwart hardware hacks as well as software-borne attacks.

National: Will A Trump Trade Move Create An Election Mess For Overseas U.S. Voters? | Tierney Sneed/TPM

The Trump administration has supported plenty of moves to make it harder to vote. But an under-the-radar action President Trump took last year, as part of his trade war with China, may be a case of him just stumbling into that outcome, election experts fear. Trump is threatening to withdraw from the international body that oversees global mail delivery, putting at risk the stability and reliability of the current system of sending and receiving mail internationally. Any disruption to the international postal service, voter advocates say, could make an already difficult process of casting ballots for Americans abroad even more complicated. Among those who stand to be affected are members of the military overseas, whose ability to vote while serving their country has always been a politically sensitive issue.

National: Senator Feinstein introduces bill limiting use of voter data by political campaigns | Emily Birnbaum/The Hill

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would limit the use of voter data by political campaigns. The legislation is being touted as the first bill “directly responding to Cambridge Analytica,” the 2018 scandal that saw a right-wing political consulting firm use data on millions of American to target pro-Trump messaging at swing voters. Feinstein’s Voter Privacy Act seeks to give voters more control over the data collected on them by political campaigns and organizations. Under the legislation, voters would be allowed to access that data, ask political campaigns to delete it and instruct social media platforms like Google and Facebook to stop sharing personal data with those political entities. The legislation would intervene in the large and growing business around voter data, which campaigns increasingly use to direct their messaging.

Editorials: Paper ballots remain the most secure | The Fayetteville Observer

Recently, the American public learned that hackers linked to Russia targeted election voting systems in all 50 states. The information came out of a Senate Intelligence Committee report, which also found “Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data.” There is no evidence that actual votes were changed, officials said, an assurance we have been given with every new revelation of Russian hacks into our voting process. But we are beginning to wonder how comfortable Americans remain in these assertions. One thing this new information makes crystal clear: Despite it being two-and-a-half years since the November 2016 election, we do not yet have a handle on the size, scope and depth of the Russian cyber-attacks that sought to influence the results. What we do know however, is that the most secure way to vote is also one of the oldest — paper ballots. That makes the current confusion at the N.C. State Board of Elections all the more frustrating. We could all be on paper ballots by now. Instead, we are in the summer of 2019 with a presidential election and congressional races set for next year, a Census year, and a wide swath of North Carolina is not even sure in what form their residents will cast their ballots. These include two of the state’s largest counties, Guilford and Mecklenburg. Both are using electronic voting machines set to be declared invalid by the state by year’s end.

Arkansas: Voting upgrade money granted, Hutchinson says | Michael R. Wickline/Arkansas Democrat & Gazette

Gov. Asa Hutchison said Thursday that $8.24 million in state funds was provided to the secretary of state’s office this week to allow counties to improve voting equipment, programming and maintenance. The Republican governor’s announcement in a news release came a day after Kurt Naumann, director of administration and legislative affairs in the secretary of state’s office, told several dozen county officials that the office expected to receive these funds in mid-August from the state Department of Finance and Administration.. The transfer was allowed under Act 808 of 2019. Hutchinson said the money was transferred out of excess revenues in the property tax relief trust fund, financed by a half-cent sales tax to pay for the homestead property tax credit, to the secretary of state’s office. The money will be awarded to counties through the county voting system grant fund. Act 808 also increases the homestead property tax credit from $350 to $375 per homestead and allows other excess revenues in the property tax relief fund to be shifted to the state’s Long-Term Reserve Fund.

Florida: More questions on Florida elections despite assurances | Paula Dockery/Orlando Sentinel

In a recent column I warned that we needed to act to protect our elections against enemies foreign and domestic. It was not my intention to sound alarmist but rather to express my sincere concern for the integrity and fairness of our elections. Since that column appeared I have heard from a U.S. attorney in one of Florida’s districts, several supervisors of elections, a representative from one of the election machine vendors I mentioned and quite a few readers. The latest to weigh in was Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee, who sent a rebuttal of my column to at least one newspaper where my column appeared. Wow, that really went to the top in short order. Secretary Lee was fairly respectful in her carefully worded response. She was firm in her denials of election system vulnerabilities and touted all that has been done to make Florida’s elections safe. I’d like to believe her but I still have my doubts. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Lee as Florida’s top election official in late January 2019 after his first appointee resigned after less than a month in office. Prior to her appointment, Lee served as a judge for Florida’s Thirteenth Judicial Circuit.

Georgia: Threats to Georgia elections loom despite new paper ballot voting | Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia was the first state in the nation to move to electronic voting machines 17 years ago, and it will be one of the last to adopt paper ballots that voters can check before they’re cast. The selection this week of a $107 million electronic voting system that combines familiar touchscreen machines with paper ballots was a big step for a state that continues to face criticism and legal challenges over its handling of the 2018 election. But critics say the system will still be vulnerable to hacking, and getting the machines ready in time for the statewide presidential primary in March won’t be easy.When the new system is installed, Georgia will be the first state in the nation to switch entirely to this kind of hybrid paper-and-tech way of conducting elections. Dominion Voting Systems will replace the state’s old Diebold electronic voting machines, which lack a paper trail for audits and recounts. The new touchscreens will be attached to printers that spit out ballots. Voters can then review their choices before inserting their paper ballots into scanning machines that will record their choices.

Maine: Secretary of State Dunlap disappointed by Senate failure to respond to election interference | Colin Woodard/Portland Press Herald

The U.S. Senate adjourned Thursday for a five-week recess without taking up a series of bipartisan bills aimed at securing the election systems from foreign interference. Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who oversees Maine’s elections and served on President Trump’s ill-fated election fraud commission, said he was disappointed but not surprised by the Senate’s failure to respond. “In this climate, I never expected anything to come out of Congress,” Dunlap told the Press Herald. “We do have to be concerned with congressional inaction because things are developing so rapidly and states need help keeping up with the bad guys.” The bills – which would have helped state and local governments tighten election security and purchase voting machines that provide a paper trail that can be consulted in the event digital tampering is suspected – were blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., prompting critics to nickname him “Moscow Mitch” and denounce him as a “Russian asset.”

North Carolina: State elections board delays mandating readable election ballots | Emery P. Dalesio/Associated Press

The state elections board declined Thursday to decide whether the next generation of voting machines should be required to furnish a paper printout so voters can read and confirm their ballots. One-third of North Carolina’s 100 counties must replace their current touch-screen voting machines after this year’s elections. The counties buy the machines but only from those vendors approved by the state Elections Board. A decision shaping how ballots will be cast and counted for years to come could come at the board’s Aug. 23 meeting. Some voters, supported by elections board member Stella Anderson, want to add a new requirement that ballot machines “produce human readable marks on a paper ballot” allowing voters to confirm their “intent as evidence by the mark on the ballot.”

North Carolina: Elections Board Awaiting New Member To Break Tie On Voting Machines | Rusty Jacobs/WUNC

North Carolina’s elections board is deadlocked over whether to require that voting machines produce a paper printout that lets voters read and confirm their ballot. The state’s Board of Elections on Thursday decided to debate the issue again in three weeks. By then, it’s likely a fifth member will be appointed to replace former chairman Bob Cordle who resigned this week. Cordle stepped down under fire Tuesday after telling an inappropriate joke at a conference for county elections officials on Monday. His resignation is significant because Cordle would have been a third vote on the five-member, bi-partisan board backing certification. Three companies are seeking certification of their equipment, including one system that doesn’t use hand-marked paper ballots and emits a ticket with a bar code that is then scanned to tabulate voters’ choices. Once a company’s system is certified by the state, the vendor may contract with individual counties. Twenty-two counties use touch-screen equipment that is due to be de-certified December 1.

Chile: Voter records for 80% of Chile’s population left exposed online | Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet

The voter information of more than 14.3 million Chileans, which accounts to nearly 80% of the country’s entire population, was left exposed and leaking on the internet inside an Elasticsearch database. ZDNet learned of the leaky server from a member of the Wizcase research team, who passed the server’s IP to this reporter last week, in order to identify the nature and source of the leak. We found that the database contained names, home addresses, gender, age, and tax ID numbers (RUT, or Rol Único Tributario) for 14,308,151 individuals. ZDNet has confirmed the validity and accuracy of this information with several of the individuals whose data was contained in the leaky database. A spokesperson for Chile’s Electoral Service — Servicio Electoral de Chile (Servel) — also confirmed the data’s authenticity; however, they denied owning the leaky server.

Switzerland: These are the arguments that sank e-voting in Switzerland – SWI swissinfo.ch

The idea of e-voting in Switzerland has been a bold dream, but the future of the entire project is now in doubt. Sceptics seem to have won the day, at least for the moment. So what issues do experts have with it? We talk to two of them. Let us first remember what has happened. The federal government put out a proposal to use an e-voting system but opponents, in this case computer scientists, were sceptical and critical. There followed an emotional debate among politicians, civil servants and the computer scientists, leading to an informed decision. It was decided that the danger of vote manipulation is too great, for it runs the risk of breaking Switzerland’s political backbone of direct democracy. Democracy also means, however, that no decision is ever cast in stone.

Georgia: ‘The selling of an election’: dangerous level of private control revealed in 2018 Georgia midterms | Jordan Wilkie/The Guardian

Private companies had near-complete control over Georgia’s elections for the 2018 midterms and posed a serious security risk, according to testimony and documents revealed during a federal court case challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s elections. The most maligned components of Georgia’s election systems – voting machines and online voter registration – were almost entirely managed by private companies, prompting concerns from election security experts. Voting machine company Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), which has close connections with the Georgia secretary of state’s office and Governor Brian Kemp’s staff, had three staff in Georgia building electronic ballots out of their homes through the 2018 midterms. This introduced significant security concerns about both foreign actors attacking the election system with malware or about a “political insider” potentially introducing their own coding that could alter the results of an election without detection, according to the plaintiffs. “It’s a shock to everyone that the vendor is actually building ballots for state elections,” said David Cross, lead attorney for one of the two groups suing the state. “That should not be happening. That should be at the state level, because the state does not have any means of ensuring the necessary security protocols of the vendor.”

National: Activists to Congress: Secure Elections or Risk a Repeat of 2016 | Gabriella Novello/WhoWhatWhy

The 2020 election could be vulnerable to another attack by hostile foreign actors if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) continues to block election security legislation. Election integrity activists are urging Congress to take action after a bombshell report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found widespread attacks by the Russian government in the 2016 election. … Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, told WhoWhatWhy that the report proves that there can no longer be a dispute as to whether Russia actually interfered in the 2016 election. Schneider said that voting systems, the pieces that tabulate the vote, and voter registration databases need to be made resilient moving forward. “That means you have to be able to monitor the systems, detect that something has gone wrong, and recover,” she said, adding that voter-marked paper ballots are “the only way to do that.” Schneider also called for “uniform federal standards coupled with federal funding,” in light of the 2016 attack on US democracy.

National: A high-level Senate report confirms it: Our elections still aren’t safe | Michael McFaul/The Washington Post

In his congressional testimony last week, former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III once again confirmed the seriousness of Moscow’s attack on our democracy in the 2016 presidential election. Yet that wasn’t even the most important news for those of us who track Russian election interference. The Senate Intelligence Committee has just published the first section of its report on Russian efforts to influence the election. The bipartisan panel’s report has made headlines by showing that the Russians probably targeted elections systems in all 50 states in 2016. That calculated operation was designed not only to help Trump but also to undermine American democracy more generally. You’d think this report would give President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) the perfect reason to support new legislation designed to enhance the security of our elections infrastructure in 2020. As the bipartisan report makes evident, enhancing cybersecurity for our election infrastructure is not a partisan issue — it’s an issue of national security. Department of Homeland Security representatives told the committee “there wasn’t a clear red state-blue state-purple state, more electoral votes, less electoral votes” pattern. So far, though, there is little sign that Trump and McConnell are paying attention.

National: Mitch McConnell just made sure election security will be key Senate campaign issue | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., smacked back at critics who have accused him of leaving the 2020 election vulnerable to Russian hackers, accusing them of “modern-day McCarthyism.” McConnell offered an impassioned 25-minute defense of his election security record on the Senate floor as Democrats accuse him of consistently blocking their bills from coming up to a vote. “I’m not going to let Democrats and their water carriers in the media use Russia’s attack on our democracy as a Trojan horse for partisan wish list items that would not actually make our elections any safer,” McConnell said. “I’m not going to do that.” His stance ensures that election security will play a major role in Senate campaigns that are ramping up now — and Democrats are already seizing the moment to make McConnell look like the face of obstruction. Within minutes of the speech, Amy McGrath, a Kentucky Democrat and retired Marine lieutenant colonel who’s seeking McConnell’s seat, slammed the majority leader on Twitter. McGrath rattled off a list of election security provisions Democrats have sought to mandate, such as paper ballots and security audits for voting machines before asking: “Tell me again how that is partisan, @senatemajldr? Oh right, you can’t.”

National: Our lax cybersecurity risks our elections and our data. We need solutions | Andrew Grotto/CNN

Our national discussions about cybersecurity and privacy follow a frustrating pattern: a headline-grabbing incident like the recent Capital One breach occurs, Congress wrings its hands and policymakers more or less move on. So it is no surprise cybersecurity hasn’t been much of a focus as the race to the 2020 presidential election heats up. The issue is here to stay, and it should be debated by the candidates. Here are some concrete ideas that would significantly improve the safety and security of the nation — but require presidential leadership if they are to come to fruition. The candidates have been justifiably outraged over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s stonewalling on election security legislation that would direct resources and expertise to state and local governments to help modernize election systems and implement paper-based backups for electronic voting, among other improvements. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller warned in Congressional hearings last week, the Russians and other bad actors will undoubtedly attempt to threaten the integrity of the 2020 election. This is no time to stand pat — Congress should pass — and the President should sign — legislation on election security before the 2020 election, not after.

National: Democrats take another stab at preventing foreign election interference | Maggie Miller/The Hill