Editorials: What “Moscow Mitch” wants: An election overrun by trolls and plunged into chaos | Bob Cesca/Salon
n the interest of big-picturing the past week or so, we learned from the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee that Russian hackers successfully infiltrated election systems in all 50 states during the 2016 election cycle. We also learned that the accused felon who was installed as commander in chief as a likely consequence of that cyber-attack spent all weekend blurting racist gibberish on Twitter while cable-news talking heads wonder how it will play among the Midwestern diner crowd. Meanwhile, the Republican Senate majority leader refuses to pass any legislation safeguarding future elections. It’s like finding out you have cancer, only to discover your surgeon is a shaky-handed drunken clown with a malfunctioning weed-whacker, and no one seems to notice. The truth about what really happened in 2016 has been a slow drip, to put it mildly. Since Nov. 8, 2016, the extent of Russian infiltration of the American democratic process has been routinely and frustratingly underestimated and lowballed, with details gradually expanding from nothing to a few states to 39 states and now, with the 2020 election 15 months away, we’ve reached a full 50 states and, according to the Senate report, “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure.”Arkansas: Some vote upgrades unsure – 21 counties lack new machines; some say cash too short | Michael R. Wickline/Arkansas Democrat & Gazette
Officials in the secretary of state's office said Wednesday that they would like to install new voting equipment by the March 3 primary election in the 21 counties that don't have it. But the office's elections director, Leslie Bellamy, told officials from these counties that they won't have new equipment for next year's election cycle if Republican Secretary of State John Thurston decides to rebid the purchase, as had been suggested. In 2015, Thurston's predecessor, Republican Secretary of State Mark Martin, decided to purchase a statewide integrated voting system, including new voting equipment, through Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software rather than California-based Unisyn Voting Solutions or Texas-based Hart Inter-Civic. Officials from some counties disagreed on whether Thurston should seek new bids. Officials from other counties said their counties are so cash-strapped that they won't be able to match state funds for new equipment.Georgia: Election officials deny evidence destruction | Kate Brumback/Associated Press
Lawyers for Georgia election officials are rejecting as frivolous allegations that their clients destroyed evidence in a case challenging the state's outdated election system. Election integrity advocates and individual Georgia voters sued election officials, saying the voting machines the state has used since 2002 are unsecure and vulnerable to hacking. In a court filing Thursday, they said the state began destroying evidence within days of the suit's filing in 2017 and has continued to do so as the case moved forward. Responding in a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for state election officials called those allegations "a desperate attempt to distract the Court and the public from the complete lack of evidence of an actual compromise of Georgia's election system." The state's election system came under national scrutiny last year during the closely watched gubernatorial election in which Republican Brian Kemp, who was the state's top election official at the time, narrowly beat Democrat Stacey Abrams. State officials on Monday announced that they have selected a new voting system and expect it to be in place in time for the presidential primary election on March 24. But the state still plans to use the outdated machines for special and municipal elections in the interim.Indiana: Paper trails for electronic voting machines coming to Indiana | David Williams/WISHTV
Millions of dollars are going in to making sure the votes of Hoosiers are safe and verifiable. Soon, it will be much easier for you to verify your vote at the polls. “In 60 of our counties, if you vote on an electronic direct-record machine, you can’t actually see the tape. You can’t actually know how your vote is recorded,” Secretary of State Connie Lawson explained Wednesday. Inside a black box is a paper audit trail that’s added to existing electronic voting machines. So how does it work? “This machine allows me to verify my vote. If I hit verify, you can see this tape moves up,” Lawson explained. “I can see on paper exactly how this machine recorded my vote. It gives the voter more confidence that this is done properly.” That little paper isn’t a receipt, so voters can’t take it home. But, that means election officials can audit the results and confirm the vote was counted.Editorials: Mississippi’s electronic election systems need to be protected | Lena Mitchell/djournal.com
Mississippians will be voting in less than a week in primary elections to choose leadership for governor, lieutenant governor and other statewide offices, as well as state senators and representatives who will make decisions about our state laws. We will be choosing who will represent the parties in elections for county officials from district supervisors, circuit clerks, chancery clerks, tax collectors, tax assessors and so forth, to county prosecutors and surveyors. All of the mechanisms we use to make these important decisions that affect our daily lives have come into question with repeatedly validated reports that our election systems are vulnerable to tampering by foreign influences. The report released last week by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed what all U.S. intelligence agencies reported in 2016 – that Russia has accessed U.S. election systems and will continue to exploit those systems’ vulnerabilities. The report said that Russian operatives have hacked election systems in all 50 states, stealing identifying information on voters in 16 states.North Carolina: State Elections Board’s Sudden Vacancy Could Affect Debate Over Certification Of New Voting Machines | Rusty Jacobs/WUNC
The sudden resignation of State Board of Elections Chairman Bob Cordle presents an opportunity for people who oppose the certification of new voting systems in future North Carolina elections. The board is scheduled to meet Thursday and had been expected to move towards certifying three new systems. Once certified by the state board, the vendors for those systems may seek contracts with individual counties. The board's two Republicans, Ken Raymond and David Black, and Cordle, a Democrat, favored certification. But Cordle stepped down Tuesday, just a day after telling an inappropriate joke during remarks at the start of a conference for state and county elections officials. Gov. Roy Cooper must now choose a replacement from a list of nominees submitted by the state Democratic Party. He could end up selecting someone who would join the board's other two Democrats, Jeff Carmon III and Stella Anderson, in opposing certification. That would tip the five-member board towards not certifying. At a public meeting on Sunday, convened to allow the voting systems vendors to present their equipment to the state elections board members, advocacy groups and concerned citizens had urged the board to put off certification and continue using the hand-marked ballot and tabulator system employed by most counties across the state. They cited potential vulnerabilities in newer voting technologies.Texas: Election officials train to spot vulnerabilities ahead of 2020 | Wes Rapaport/KXAN
Hundreds of election administrators, county clerks, and voter registrars converged on a hotel ballroom in Austin for training with the Texas Secretary of State’s office. The theme of the week is election security and integrity. The nearly 800 election officials came from across the state to share best practices to prevent tampering with Texas elections. “I am getting a lot of information crammed into my brain in three days,” Archer County election administrator and voter registrar Christie Mooney said. Mooney is a one-person operation in Texoma, keeping track of approximately 6,270 voters in the county, and administering elections. “Every election official needs to learn the new laws that came out of the legislative session that just happened,” she explained.India: Why Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails aren’t enough to build confidence in electronic voting machines | Atanu Biswas/Hindustan Times
Two months after the declaration of Lok Sabha election results, conspiracy theories about possible tampering of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) are still doing the rounds. That important opposition leaders have demanded a return to paper ballots and even openly supported EVM-rigging theories has lend credence to the latter – although some of their behavior can be attributed to just being bad losers. Still, doubts about EVMs have been planted, despite the fact that none of the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines showed a mismatch with the EVM count. The Supreme Court ordered the Election Commission of India (ECI) that five VVPATs per assembly constituency (AC) should be matched with the EVM count of votes. Statistically speaking this is adequate to remove doubts about possible tampering of EVMs. In an earlier article in HT dated April 27, 2018, this author had argued that tallying just 11, 29, 58 and 534 VVPATs per parliamentary constituency (PC) would allow us to find a rigged EVM with 95% probability for scenarios where 25%, 10%, 5% and 0.5% of the EVMs were tampered in a given PC. Are EVM rigging fears an example of conspiracy theories defeating statistical methods? Ironical as it may sound; an eighteenth century concept in statistics known as Bayes’ theorem can helpUnited Kingdom: Former Cambridge Analytica director, Brittany Kaiser, dumps more evidence of Brexit’s democratic trainwreck | Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch
A UK parliamentary committee has published new evidence fleshing out how membership data was passed from UKIP, a pro-Brexit political party, to Leave.EU, a Brexit supporting campaign active in the 2016 EU referendum — via the disgraced and now defunct data company, Cambridge Analytica. In evidence sessions last year, during the DCMS committee’s enquiry into online disinformation, it was told by both the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, and the main financial backer of the Leave.EU campaign, the businessman Arron Banks, that Cambridge Analytica did no work for the Leave.EU campaign. Documents published today by the committee clearly contradict that narrative — revealing internal correspondence about the use of a UKIP dataset to create voter profiles to carry out “national microtargeting” for Leave.EU. They also show CA staff raising concerns about the legality of the plan to model UKIP data to enable Leave.EU to identify and target receptive voters with pro-Brexit messaging. The UK’s 2016 in-out EU referendum saw the voting public narrowing voting to leave — by 52:48.National: Why is Mitch McConnell blocking election security bills? Good question. | Amber Phillips/The Washington Post
As President Trump’s own FBI director warns that Russians are planning to try to undermine American democracy in the next presidential election, Republican lawmakers led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are blocking bills aimed at blocking foreign hackers from states’ voting systems. Why? Republicans have policy objections to the legislation, but it seems clear that politics is at the forefront of McConnell’s decision-making. Specifically, the politics of pleasing Trump. Trump is so sensitive to findings that Russians tried to help him win in 2016 that a Cabinet secretary was warned against briefing him on it. He’s repeatedly sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence community about whether Russians interfered. He’s said he might accept foreign help in his 2020 reelection. And last month, he made light of it all when he mock-scolded Putin in front of cameras. “Don’t meddle in the election,” he said, waving a finger and wearing a smile. That puts McConnell in a tough spot: Pass legislation, which election security experts say is needed, and risk sparking the president’s ire, or block the legislation — and risk increased Russia election interference and public ridicule.National: ‘Moscow Mitch’ Tag Enrages McConnell and Squeezes G.O.P. on Election Security | Carl Hulse/The New York Times
Senator Mitch McConnell is usually impervious to criticism, even celebrating the nasty nicknames critics bestow on him. But Mr. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is incensed by the name “Moscow Mitch,” and even more miffed that he has been called a “Russian asset” by critics who accuse him of single-handedly blocking stronger election security measures after Russia’s interference in 2016. Democrats had been making the case for months, but it was supercharged last week by the testimony of Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, who told the House Intelligence Committee that the Russians were back at it “as we sit here.” Mr. McConnell cites several reasons for his opposition — a longstanding resistance to federal control over state elections, newly enacted security improvements that were shown to have worked in the 2018 voting and his suspicion that Democrats are trying to gain partisan advantage with a host of proposals. Republican colleagues say that Mr. McConnell, a longtime foe of tougher campaign finance restrictions and disclosure requirements, is leery of even entering into legislative negotiation that could touch on fund-raising and campaign spending.National: Election Security Needs Increased Federal Investment | Lucas Ropek/Government Technology
Foreign interference is still an ongoing threat to state and local election security and can only be guarded against through increased federal assistance, warns a recently published report.
Defending Elections, published by the Brennan Center for Justice, claims that state and local governments are on the “front line” of a “cyberwar” with foreign actors and hackers.
Ever since the 2016 Russian intrusion into the U.S. presidential election, concern over voting system integrity has been a top priority for officials at all levels of government as well as the American public. With recent news that Russia’s efforts were far more extensive than initially believed, it isn’t hard to see why states are looking to bolster their cybersecurity.
For years, one of the biggest programs to increase election security has been the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a George W. Bush-era federal law which last year provided $380 million in federal grant funding to assist with election security for state and local governments.
States spent only around 8 percent of this funding during the 2018 elections, but are on track to spend the vast majority of it during 2020, according to The Washington Post.
HAVA, which has been providing assistance since 2002, still does not do enough to satisfy the actual security needs of most states, according to the new report.
Many state and local governments have “substantial election security needs that likely will not be met absent additional federal support,” according to the report. It further concludes that these governments are “ill equipped to defend themselves against the sophisticated, well-resourced intelligence agencies of foreign governments.”
Those foreign governments may include Russia, China and Iran, according to Trump officials, who feel that a whole host of countries may attempt to inject their influence into the 2020 presidential election.
The Brennan report looks at the needs of a representative sample of states, including Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma, Illinois, Louisiana and Pennsylvania; detailing the federal allocations they received last year, and the areas that will still need further investment.
Arizona, for example, received over $7 million in funds from the federal grant in 2018, the bulk of which went toward investing in cybersecurity, including an IT infrastructure security assessment and increased inter-agency information sharing. The funds were also used to help replace the state’s voter registration database.
However, the state ultimately needs further investment to replace its legacy voting systems, which many experts consider to be a liability due to their use of outdated software that may not receive consistent security patches.
Other states, like Oklahoma, spent millions in federal funding to upgrade their voter registration databases and security, as well as on new election system equipment and cybersecurity training. However, more funding is needed to ensure post-election audits, as well as upgrades to voting equipment and the state’s voter registration virtual private network.
For many states, like Pennsylvania, further investment is needed in basic cybersecurity assessments and trainings, which give elections staff the skills necessary to identify vulnerabilities and avoid spear-phishing campaigns.