Yearly Archives: 2019

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.

National: Voting Machine Firms Add Lobbyists Amid Election Hacker Concerns | Bloomberg

Voting machine manufacturers are increasing their Capitol Hill presence as lawmakers demand they do more to protect U.S. elections against foreign hackers. Dominion Voting Systems — which commands more than a third of the voting-machine market without having Washington lobbyists — has hired its first, a high-powered firm that includes a longtime aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The No. 1 vendor, Election Systems & Software, added two new lobbying firms last fall. Members of Congress have criticized those and other companies for their security methods and business practices.

Uncategorized: Top Democrats press voting vendors over election security concerns | The Hill

Democratic senators sent a letter to three of the country’s top election system vendors on Tuesday, pressing them on what they will do to help secure the 2020 election from foreign attacks. The letter, sent to the heads of voting vendors Election Systems & Software LLC, Hart InterCivic Inc. and Dominion Voting Systems, requested that the companies inform Democratic leaders of efforts to improve their systems to guard against cyber vulnerabilities. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, was joined on the letter by Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.), Senate Homeland Security Committee ranking member Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.). “Despite the progress that has been made, election security experts and federal and state government officials continue to warn that more must be done to fortify our election systems,” the senators wrote. “Of particular concern is the fact that many of the machines that Americans use to vote have not been meaningfully updated in nearly two decades.”

National: Bill Seeks to Aid Senators in Protecting Personal Devices | GovInfo Security

Legislation introduced last week would give the U.S. Senate’s sergeant at arms responsibility to help secure the personal devices and online accounts used by senators and their staff to help ward off cyberattacks and other threats. The bill, known as the “Senate Cybersecurity Protection Act of 2019,” was introduced by senators Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who both serve on the Intelligence Committee. While there is not yet a similar bill pending in the House to provide members with similar services, backers of the Senate bill are urging the House to take up a similar measure. The Senate bill would allow the sergeant at arms, who is already responsible for cybersecurity within the Senate, to provide voluntary cybersecurity assistance for personal accounts and devices to senators and certain staff members. This could include assistance with security for personal hardware, such as laptops, desktops, cell phones, tablets and other internet-connected devices, as well as personal accounts, including email, text messaging, cloud computing and social media as well as residential internet, healthcare and financial services, according to a summary.

National: US ripe for Russian meddling in 2020 vote, experts warn | Financial Times

In the wake of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the US electoral system, experts warn the nation is just as exposed as it was in 2016, raising new concerns about the 2020 presidential election. More than two years after intelligence agencies exposed Moscow’s efforts to exploit weaknesses in the US democratic system, technology companies and state governments have yet to come to terms with a foreign power’s meddling in domestic affairs of state. When it comes to the 2020 presidential vote, the US faces many of the same vulnerabilities that made its electoral system a prime target In 2016 — and perhaps some new ones, said Doug Lute, a former American ambassador to Nato and retired Army lieutenant-general who has taken up the cause of US election security. “We are more prepared in the sense that we are more aware. But we are little better prepared in terms of actual security,” said Mr Lute. He noted that Russia’s strategy in 2016 resembled an age-old Russian military doctrine: to attack on a broad front, assess strengths and weaknesses, then prepare to reattack vulnerabilities — a potentially dangerous scenario for 2020.

California: Russian meddling and election integrity in California | Los Angeles Daily News

Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” we can all move on to fighting over whether those activities actually changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress summarizing the Mueller report says the special counsel determined that there were two main Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election: “The first involved attempts by a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), to conduct disinformation and social media operations in the United States designed to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election. The second element involved the Russian government’s efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks.” Mueller has brought criminal charges against a number of Russian individuals, Russian military officers, and Russian companies or entities in connection with these activities. They’re never going to be in a U.S. courtroom, but the indictments tell us what happened.

New York: Questions Over Mike Ryan Pushing for ES&S Voting Machines | NY1

The city’s Board of Elections is arguing it may need some new voting machines because of early voting, but the board’s leader is pushing for machines made by a company he has benefited from, raising questions of conflicts of interest. For almost 10 years, New York City has used the same type of voting machine: An optical scanner. But now, the city Board of Elections may want to try something else. It’s a new machine called the ExpressVote XL, and it’s made by the major voting machine manufacturer, Election Systems and Software (ES&S). In a letter exclusively obtained by NY1, the city asked the state Board of Elections this week to possibly use the new machine for early voting this year. It says using paper ballots would be virtually impossible. That’s because there will be far fewer poll sites open for early voting than on a traditional election day. Officials question whether every site would be able to keep all of the different ballot configurations for each election district, and this ExpressVote XL machine uses a touch screen to vote instead. But there is a problem: The state Board of Elections has not certified or fully tested this machine for use in New York. The city Board of Elections is essentially asking state officials to skirt that approval process, specifically asking permission from the state board to use the machine in this fall’s general election. The letter states “time is of the essence.” It is signed by two people. One is the executive director of the board, Michael Ryan. One leader of the state Board of Elections immediately dismissed the city board’s request: “What annoyed me most about the letter is it doesn’t seem to understand the reason for New York’s certification for voting equipment,” state Board of Elections Co-Chair Douglas Kellner said. “We have to recognize that there are security risks.”

North Carolina: Counties Face Tight Timeline To Comply With State Voting Law | WUNC

Counties across the state are working to beat a December deadline to replace touch-screen voting machines with models that use a paper ballot in order to comply with a 2013 state law. Twenty-five counties, including Mecklenburg, Guilford, Forsyth and Union, will need to upgrade all or some of their equipment. North Carolina State Board of Elections spokesperson Patrick Gannon said updating the equipment is important “to ensure that voters are confident that when they cast a ballot, that their choices are recorded properly and they can be audited on the back end if there are concerns about whether or not votes were counted properly.” There is currently only one voting machine model that’s certified for use, but the State Board of Elections will meet soon to consider certifying additional models. Gannon said counties making the switch need to test their equipment this fall ahead of the 2020 primary next March. “The counties must be able to test any new system in the municipal election in order for it to be used in an election next year,” he said.

North Carolina: Legislators seek reprieve for Guilford County voting machines | Greensboro News and Record

Ask and ye shall receive — or at least get a reasonable shot at receiving. Two local legislators introduced a bill this week approving more than two years of additional life for Guilford County’s voting machines, only a week after county leaders formally petitioned the General Assembly for just such help. If passed, the bipartisan measure introduced by state Reps. Jon Hardister, R-Whitsett, and Amos Quick, D-Greensboro, would give county taxpayers a reprieve on the estimated $8 million cost of replacing the county’s 1,400-plus machines. The measure also would apply to Alamance County, which faces a similar dilemma and an estimated $2 million in replacement costs. Hardister said Friday afternoon that he filed the bill with Quick and fellow Reps. Dennis Riddell, R-Snow Camp, and Frank Iler, R-Oak Island, after a conversation with Guilford County Board of Elections Director Charlie Collicutt.

Australia: Government allocates funds to boost election security | iTWire

The Federal Government has allocated an unspecified amount in Tuesday’s Federal Budget to improve cyber security arrangements for the forthcoming election. The amount was not specified due to what the government said were national security reasons. The Budget papers say the money will be for mitigating potential threats through enhanced monitoring and response capabilities. It will also be spent towards the creation of cyber “Sprint Teams” within the Australian Cyber Security Centre and a Cyber Security Response Fund. In February this year, it was announced that the network of the Australian Parliament had been breached by hackers whose affiliations have not yet been revealed. The networks of the three major political parties — Liberal, Labor and National — were also infiltrated.

Switzerland: Additional flaw found in Swiss Post e-voting system | SWI

A second error in the Swiss Post planned e-voting system has been discovered as the public intrusion test phase comes to an end. The Federal Chancellery announced the need for action and confirmed a review of the e-voting certification and approval process. The same computer experts who discovered a critical error in the source code of Swiss Post’s new e-voting system earlier this month announced they discovered a further security gap. It was identified as part of the public intrusion test that has been running since February 25, during which the e-voting source code was released. The bug affects universal verifiability – the same area of the system as the first error. However, in this case the error would not make it possible for arbitrary manipulation of any possible votes to go unnoticed, according to the Federal Chancellery. That said, votes could be made invalid without being discovered by the mathematical evidence. René Lenzin, deputy head of communications at the Federal Chancellery, told the Swiss news agency Keystone-SDA that the error confirmed a “need for action”. The error discovered on March 12 had already shown that universal verifiability and thus the “heart of the system” had not worked. The system had to recognise if manipulation had taken place.

Thailand: Demonstrators protest alleged cheating in election | AFP

Thai demonstrators on Sunday protested against alleged cheating in the junta-ruled kingdom’s first election since a 2014 coup, a week after the controversial poll sowed confusion over the ballot results. A military-backed party and its main rival led by a self-exiled billionaire have both claimed the right to lead the government as inconsistent tallies released by the Election Commission have raised suspicion among voters. The junta-aligned Phalang Pracharat party clinched the popular vote but its rival Pheu Thai — linked to former premier Thaksin Shinawatra — has formed a coalition claiming a majority of seats in the lower house. Full results will be ratified by May 9 but anger has mounted as the wait continues, prompting demonstrations at two Bangkok landmarks. A small but spirited group gathered near the tourist hotspot Erawan Shrine holding a banner that read “Cheating Election” and “People Want to Vote”. It featured the face of 2014 coup leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha, who is standing as the prime ministerial candidate for Phalang Pracharat. “It is the Pheu Thai party which won the election,” organiser and activist Anurak Jeantawanich said.

Ukraine: Disrupt and discredit: Russia still has Ukrainian elections in sights | KyivPost

Exit polls from the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election, released late on March 31, seem to confirm what has long been believed: that no openly pro-Russian candidate has a chance to secure this Ukrainian presidency. But it doesn’t seem that will stop the Kremlin from having its voice heard, or from trying to have some of its strategic objectives secured, observers note. On April 1, as ballots were still being tallied, the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and Russia officially, although quietly, expired. Previously renewed automatically each decade, Ukrainian lawmakers approved the treaty’s termination on Dec. 6, 2018, after roughly four years of undeclared war between the two nations. Also on April 1, as the likely outcome of the Ukrainian presidential election started to become more clear, elected Russian lawmakers prepared a statement of “non-recognition” of the result. The move is yet another signal that Moscow is committed to discrediting the election and not accepting its outcome.

National: Feds Seek To Up Their Cybersecurity Game | Forbes

The idea that the U.S. federal government could play a dominant and effective role in protecting the nation from malicious cyberattacks on everything from Internet of Things (IoT) devices to critical infrastructure to election voting systems might strike some people as absurd. Its catastrophic security failures are well known.

– The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) couldn’t protect the personally identifiable information (PII) of more than 22 million current and former federal employees.

– The National Security Agency (NSA) couldn’t protect its own stash of so-called zero-day vulnerabilities that it hoped to use to spy on, or attack, hostile nation states or terrorist groups. Instead, the stash ended up in the hands of Wikileaks.

National: Senate Democrats push to match House’s ethics and election reforms | The Washington Post

Responding to action in the House, Senate Democrats unveiled their own version of a sweeping election and ethics reform bill Wednesday — one that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed never to bring to a vote. Dubbed, like the House bill, the For the People Act, the Senate legislation includes a vast suite of proposals — including measures meant to expand voting, provisions aimed at unmasking and diluting the power of moneyed interests, new ethical strictures for federal officials and a new public financing system for congressional campaigns. The bill, according to its lead author, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), has the support of all 47 senators in the Democratic caucus. The House bill passed 234 to 193 this month with unanimous Democratic support, meaning every congressional Democrat is on record in support of the bill. “Today we are seizing their momentum and the momentum of the American people,” Udall said at a news conference Wednesday. “Now the ball is in Senator McConnell’s court. . . . This should not be about Democrats versus Republicans, this is about people versus special interests.”

National: Voting-machine vendors have some serious questions to answer, senators say | CyberScoop

While the security of the 2020 election remains a prominent topic in Washington, a group of Democratic senators is raising alarms about longer-term issues that will resonate after voters are done choosing a president about 20 months from now. The three companies that make most of the voting technology used in the U.S. must be more transparent about their plans to improve their products to meet current expectations about security and performance, says a letter Wednesday by Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and three other top Democrats. In particular, the senators say every machine should reliably produce paper records, and the companies should do far more to upgrade their products. “The integrity of our elections is directly tied to the machines we vote on — the products that you make,” says the letter from Klobuchar, Mark Warner of Virginia, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Gary Peters of Michigan. “Despite shouldering such a massive responsibility, there has been a lack of meaningful innovation in the election vendor industry and our democracy is paying the price.”

National: Former CIA leaders give ‘briefing book’ to 2020 candidates to counteract ‘fake news’ and ‘foreign election interference’ | The Washington Post

Two former top CIA officials have compiled an unclassified report on the major national security challenges facing the United States, which they are distributing to every candidate running for president. The report, which former acting CIA directors Michael Morell and John McLaughlin call a “briefing book,” is modeled on the classified oral briefing that the intelligence community provides to the nominees of each major political party running for president, usually after the nominating conventions. The former officials said they’re distributing their briefing now, more than a year before nominees are selected, in response to “the recent rise and abundance of fake news and foreign election interference,” according to a copy reviewed by The Washington Post. The 37-page document, which has not been previously reported, was sent this month to nearly every announced candidate and will soon be sent to President Trump, the former officials said. Intelligence agencies have usually viewed their discussions with nominees as a chance to prepare a potential president for the kinds of issues that he or she will have to grapple with, and to give them a sense of the kind of capabilities and expertise that the U.S. government can bring to bear.

Editorials: Fixing US Elections Is Easier—and Harder—Than You’d Think | Max Eddy/PCMag

When I flew out to San Francisco for the RSA Convention (RSAC) in early March, I planned to attend all the election security talks I could fit into my schedule. It’s an obvious choice. While the 2018 midterms concluded without much controversy, we’re still fighting over the 2016 presidential election, and we’re halfway to the next one. That’s in addition to the US system of casting and counting votes being, at best, a barely functional shambles. I expected the usual doom-and-gloom about election security, with researchers bemoaning the sorry state of voting machines in the US. I was even looking forward to it, because you have to be a little masochistic to be in this industry. There was a bit of the usual misery, but I wasn’t prepared for a double whammy of optimism and despair. I left convinced that we’ve actually sorted out the most pressing of the technological problems with voting. What has us stumped is the other stuff. And that’s a lot of stuff.

Georgia: Georgia likely to plow ahead with buying insecure voting machines | Politico

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is poised to sign a bill to overhaul the state’s voting system with machines that are widely considered vulnerable to hacking. The new equipment would replace the state’s paperless, electronic machines — technology so risky that a federal judge said last year that its continued use threatened Georgians’ “constitutional interests.” But security researchers say similar risks exist in the new electronic machines that the GOP-led legislature has chosen, which would embed the voter’s choice in a barcode on a slip of paper. The warnings from cybersecurity experts, election integrity advocates and Georgia Democrats are especially troubling given the abundant warnings from U.S. intelligence leaders that Russia will once again attempt to undermine the presidential election in 2020. “The bill’s sponsors made false and misleading statements during the entire legislative session in hearings leading up to the vote, often flatly contradicting objective evidence or mischaracterizing scientific writing,” said Georgia Institute of Technology computer science professor Rich DeMillo, who testified throughout the process.

New Jersey: New Jersey was going to have paper-based voting machines more than a decade ago. Will it happen by 2020? | Philadelphia Inquirer

New Jersey was once poised to become a national leader in election and voting security. Instead, it now lags most states — including Pennsylvania and Delaware — by relying on aging, paperless machines that experts say are vulnerable to attack and can’t be properly audited. There are no statewide plans to buy new machines; nor is the state urging counties to buy new systems, in contrast to Pennsylvania, where Gov. Tom Wolf has ordered all 67 counties to have new machines by next year’s primary election. “We are doing what we can with the funding that we have and the situation that we’re in,” said Robert Giles, who heads the state’s Division of Elections. The challenge, he said, is funding. Counties are left to their own initiatives. But the current machines are nearing death. The money will have to come from somewhere, said Jesse Burns, head of the League of Women Voters of New Jersey. “Time, it has run out. So there’s no more kicking it down the road,” she said.

Pennsylvania: Questions abound over new voting machines in Luzerne County | Citizens’ Voice

It looks like Luzerne County voters will not use new voting machines until next year, thanks in part to uncertainties over state funding. Also, it is not clear when officials will release information about investigations into county elections director Marisa Crispell’s ties to county vendor Election Systems & Software — one of the prospective vendors for the new machines. The county plans to purchase an electronic voting system that provides added security via a “paper trail” for each vote cast, to comply with a directive state officials issued last year. When county officials first discussed the planned purchase, with an estimated price tag of $4 million, they said the new machines might be in place for this year’s November election. That does not look likely now, though it’s not impossible, according to county Manager David Pedri. “We would still like to get them in for November,” Pedri said Thursday. “The question is when we can get them.”

Australia: Committee pushes ‘cyber taskforce’ for security of Australia’s election system | ZDNet

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters is tasked with overseeing the Australian electoral system, specifically the activities of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). Its Status Report [PDF], released on Friday, follows the November publication of the Report on the conduct of the 2016 federal election and matters related thereto [PDF], which made 31 recommendations to the AEC regarding cybersecurity, in particular where the manipulation of elections was concerned. One of the recommendations made by the committee was that the Australian government establish a permanent taskforce to “prevent and combat cyber manipulation in Australia’s democratic process” and to “provide transparent, post-election findings regarding any pertinent incidents”. Specifically, the taskforce, the committee wrote, would focus on “systemic privacy breaches”. In its latest report, the committee again recommended the taskforce be established.

Canada: Officials worry that foreign actors are trying to meddle in 2019 election | The Toronto Star