American Democracy Isn’t Ready for Online Voting | Spenser Mestel/The Atlantic

This weekend, Australians will vote in the country’s federal elections. The process will likely be seamless, transparent, and punctuated by countless civic-minded barbecues affectionately known as sausage sizzles. This is how elections generally go in Australia, but for those in New South Wales, that wasn’t the case late last year. The state had encouraged a significant number of voters to move to an internet-voting system called iVote. In December, it melted down so badly that the New South Wales Electoral Commission not only discontinued its use but also asked a court to nullify the results of three city-council elections. It was an embarrassing failure for e-voting. More than 650,000 online votes were cast—probably a world record, says Vanessa Teague, an election-security expert and a professor at the Australian National University. Teague has been warning governments about vulnerabilities in e-voting for years, as have cybersecurity researchers in the U.S., where systems like iVote are being expanded in at least nine states. Letting people vote from home with the click of a button is an appealing idea, especially in the U.S., where turnout is abysmal. The problem, the American Association for the Advancement of Science says, is that there’s no “evidence that any internet voting technology is safe or can be made so in the foreseeable future … All research to date demonstrates the opposite.”

Full Article: American Democracy Isn’t Ready for Online Voting – The Atlantic

Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary heads to a recount as Oz and McCormick scrap over ballots in court | Jonathan Lai, Jeremy Roebuck, and Julia Terruso/Philadelphia Inquirer

It’s official: The razor’s edge primary contest between GOP Senate candidates Mehmet Oz and David McCormick is headed to a recount, state elections officials announced Wednesday, ensuring that the victor in the closely watched race won’t be officially declared for at least two weeks. The announcement came even as counties continued to tally lingering batches of ballots and the gap between the two candidates dwindled to fewer than 1,000 votes. Speaking at a news conference in Harrisburg, acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman said that Oz led McCormick by just 902 votes, or less than 0.08% of the more than 1.3 million ballots cast in their race. By Wednesday evening the margin had shrunk even further. That put their contest well within the 0.5% margin of victory that triggers an automatic recount under state law. And as Pennsylvania’s 67 counties prepared to begin the retallying process as early as Friday, Chapman vowed the recount would take place “transparently, as dictated by law.” “I know Pennsylvanians and, indeed, people throughout the country have been following this race attentively and are eagerly awaiting the results,” she said. “I thank everyone for their patience as we count every vote.”

Full Article: Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary heads to a recount as Oz and McCormick scrap over ballots in court

National: A PDF File Is Not Paper, So PDF Ballots Cannot Be Verified | Andrew Appel/Freedom to Tinker

A new paper by Henry Herrington, a computer science undergraduate at Princeton University, demonstrates that a hacked PDF ballot can display one set of votes to the voter, but different votes after it’s emailed – or uploaded – to election officials doing the counting. For overseas voters or voters with disabilities, many states provide “Remote Accessible Vote By Mail,” or RAVBM, a system that allows voters the ability to download and print an absentee ballot, fill it out by hand on paper, and physically mail it back.  Some states use commercial products, while others have developed their own solutions.  In general, this form of RAVBM can be made adequately secure, mainly because the voters make their own marks on the paper. In some forms of RAVBM, the voter can fill out the ballot using an app on their computer before printing and mailing it.  This is less secure: if malware on the voter’s computer has “hacked” the voting app, what’s printed out may differ from what the voter indicated on the screen, and voters are not very good at reviewing the printouts and noticing such changes. The most dangerous form of RAVBM is one that allows electronic ballot return, in which the voter uploads or emails a PDF file. Thirty states allow overseas voters to do electronic ballot return, either by email, fax, or web-portal upload, as shown in Table 5 (pages 34-35) of Herrington’s longer paper, Ballot Acrobatics: Altering Electronic Ballots using Internal PDF Scripting.

Full Article: A PDF File Is Not Paper, So PDF Ballots Cannot Be Verified

National: Security chiefs scramble to prevent Russian interference in midterms | Tom Rees/The Telegraph

US security chiefs are scrambling to prevent Russian interference in the midterm elections as they are “very concerned” about the Kremlin using cyber warfare and online disinformation. Jen Easterly, US director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the US has been forced to beef up its election cybersecurity after the Kremlin was accused of influencing the 2016 vote to help Donald Trump win. Joe Biden and the Democrats are heading into a difficult midterms and a recent Ipsos MORI poll found that more than half of Americans are concerned about Russia spreading misinformation online in this year’s election. Ms Easterly said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that US officials are “very concerned” but have “raised the bar” on election infrastructure cybersecurity. “I’m projecting myself into November because obviously we are very concerned about foreign [influence],” Ms Easterly said. “I frankly, don’t think that Russia needs to do anything to create chaos in our elections.” Ms Easterly said she is “much more concerned about physical threats to election officials and disinformation threats to the American people’s confidence.”

Full Article: US security chiefs scramble to prevent Russian interference in midterms

National: How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures | Nick Corasaniti, Karen Yourish and Keith Collins/The New York Times

At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of legislative votes, records and official statements by The New York Times. The tally accounts for 44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided. In each of those states, the election was conducted without any evidence of widespread fraud, leaving election officials from both parties in agreement on the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr. The Times’s analysis exposes how deeply rooted lies and misinformation about former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat have become in state legislatures, which play an integral role in U.S. democracy. In some, the false view that the election was stolen — either by fraud or as a result of pandemic-related changes to the process — is now widely accepted as fact among Republican lawmakers, turning statehouses into hotbeds of conspiratorial thinking and specious legal theories.

Full Article: How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures – The New York Times

National: This nonprofit will use big data to fight voter suppression in the midterm elections | Adele Peters/Fast Company

After the presidential election in 2020, when Georgia launched runoff elections for the state’s two Senate seats, officials in Cobb County on the outskirts of Atlanta announced that they were going to shut down several early voting sites in diverse neighborhoods. But a recently launched nonprofit stepped in, using anonymized cell phone data to show the impact that the change would have on voters. “We were able to use the data we had already collected to show how shutting down those specific polling locations would disproportionately impact voters of color,” says Daniel Wein, cofounder and head of partnerships at the nonprofit, called the Center for New Data. “And in two days, that information was published and was circulated in the community. Stacey Abrams tweeted about it. And Cobb County reversed several of the poll closures.” The nonprofit, part of the current cohort at the impact tech accelerator Fast Forward, makes use of the type of data typically used by advertisers—location data from smartphones—to understand how long voters have to wait in line; in 2020, the nonprofit said it would receive voter wait time data from the November 3 election, collected by location-data mining companies X-Mode Social and Veraset, as soon as November 4. The methodology for using this data to analyze disparities at polling places came from a study, published in 2019, that analyzed anonymous location data from 10 million smartphones at 93,000 polling places to create a detailed picture of wait times. In Black neighborhoods, voters waited 29% longer to vote than those in white neighborhoods, per that study. They were also 74% more likely to end up waiting more than half an hour.

Full Article: This nonprofit will use big data to fight voter suppression in the 202

Editorial: America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert Reich/The Guardian

Decades ago, America’s monied interests bankrolled a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism and constitutional democracy. Today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America – backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting and even questioning the value of democracy. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15m to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” Thiel has donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore. The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions. Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, which includes Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.

Full Article: America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert Reich | The Guardian

As Arizona Republicans revive lawsuit to stop early voting, Attorney General won’t defend the state | Mary Jo Pitzl/Arizona Republic

The Republican Party has restarted its lawsuit to end early voting in Arizona, but the state won’t have a key official defending the practice: Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has dropped out of the case. The decision not to defend the early voting system came from a mutual agreement between the Republican Party of Arizona, which filed the complaint, and the Attorney General’s Office, court records show. It is not clear who initiated the move to leave the lawsuit. “I’ll let the AG’s office comment on that,” said attorney Alexander Kolodin, who is representing the state party. Brnovich’s office did not reply to a query about why he agreed to the move. But in a filing to the Mohave County Superior Court, state Solicitor General Brunn W. Roysden III stated the Attorney General’s Office agrees to be bound by the outcome of the lawsuit, including any appeals. The state GOP moved their lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of early voting to Mohave County after the state Supreme Court last month declined to take up the matter, saying it needed to start in a lower court. A hearing is scheduled for June 3.

Full Article: Attorney General Mark Brnovich won’t defend early voting in GOP case

Colorado’s June 28 primary will test just how much Republicans embrace 2020 election conspiracies | Jesse Paul/The Colorado Sun

Eli Bremer thinks that his refusal to embrace unfounded claims that former President Donald Trump really won the 2020 election cost him a spot on the Republican U.S. Senate primary ballot this year. “Absolutely,” said Bremer, a former Olympic athlete who in April fell well short of the support he needed from Colorado GOP state assembly delegates to advance to the June 28 contest. But he doesn’t think the assembly electorate, made up of about 3,500 party insiders, is reflective of the broader Republican primary electorate. “I think that the election-was-stolen group is a very small, but very agitated group right now,” he said. “I don’t see a broad movement.” In a month we’ll find out whether he is right. In virtually every major Republican primary race in Colorado this year, from the U.S. Senate contest to the battle over who will be the GOP nominee in the highly competitive new 8th Congressional District, voters will have a choice between a candidate or candidates who baselessly believe the outcome of the last presidential election was fraudulent and those who don’t.

Full Article: How much do Colorado Republicans embrace election conspiracies?

Georgia election board sidesteps calls for paper ballots while possible server breach under investigation | Doug Richards/11alive.com

A possible election security compromise in south Georgia apparently won’t lead to any changes in the way the state conducts this month’s primary or subsequent runoff. The state election board chairman says the incident is under investigation but there’s no evidence yet to take emergency action. The issue is whether a possible election security breach in south Georgia compromises the state’s new voting system statewide. The state’s voting system runs on computer software shared by voting machines in every Georgia county. Now, election officials say they are looking into a possible security breach in Coffee County, where a backer of former President Donald Trump allegedly got access to an election server and made images, or copies, of the code that runs it. “This is a single point of failure that is a nightmare for cybersecurity experts,” said one of Georgia’s foremost cybersecurity experts.  Dr. Rich DeMillo, head of Georgia Tech’s cybersecurity program, says it potentially threatens voting systems statewide. “Someone who wants to install malware on a server normally has to do this at arms length. You’ve given now (potential hackers) the ability to directly access the machine and do it,” DeMillo told 11Alive News.

Full Article: Paper ballots unlikely after election server breach allegation | 11alive.com

Kansas Secretary of State weary of fact-averse out-of-staters who insult Kansas election system | Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector

Secretary of State Scott Schwab believes election security requires vigilance due to evolution of cyber threats, but the voice of Kansas’ top election official revealed a touch of exasperation when conversation pivoted to uninformed people dedicated to shaking public confidence in voting systems. Schwab said Kansas had conducted 300 post-election audits without uncovering a single failure. Still, he said, people were pushing theories of voter misconduct that fell short when it came to leaping from suspicion to fact. “Folks from out of state have come in and insulted the Kansas election system,” Schwab said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “And, they haven’t read our laws. They’ve never been here on Election Day. They’d never watched the tabulation process. They’ve never been a poll worker.” … The Kansas Legislature adopted a collection of new election policies during the 2022 session, and Schwab said he had no objection to the Legislature’s efforts to make certain every legal vote was counted. In the background, however, was a national movement stoked by election skeptics who declared — without evidence — the United States was awash in fraud.

Full Article: Secretary of state weary of fact-averse out-of-staters who insult Kansas election system – Kansas Reflector

Michigan lawmaker entangled in voting tabulator probe | Craig Mauger and Beth LeBlanc/The Detroit News

Michigan state Rep. Daire Rendon, a Republican who has previously claimed to have evidence of election fraud from information technology “experts,” has quietly become entangled in a probe into unauthorized access to voting tabulators. The Michigan State Police and Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office have been investigating voting machine access in multiple counties in the battleground state for months. Their work started in Roscommon County, a northern Michigan area represented by Rendon, a Republican from Lake City. Carol Asher, the longtime clerk in Denton Township, told The Detroit News on Friday that Rendon had contacted her in the weeks after the November 2020 election with a request that baffled her. “She wanted to get access to our tabulator, and I said no,” recalled Asher, who added that she believed Rendon had contacted other clerks as well. “She called me on my cellphone on a Saturday,” Asher added. The Attorney General’s Office had been in contact with Asher, the clerk said, and she provided a statement about Rendon’s request on March 10, 2022, according to a document reviewed by The News. The subject line of the statement was “statement regarding phone call received about tabulator access.”

Full Article: Michigan lawmaker entangled in voting tabulator probe

Montana election officials report threats ahead of primary | Sam Wilson/Helena Independent Record

Escalating rhetoric related to voter-fraud conspiracy theories is crossing the line into what election officials say are threats against their physical safety, with less than two weeks left before Montana’s primary election. Addressing the state Legislature’s oversight committee for election processes, Montana Commissioner of Political Practices Jeff Mangan said Wednesday he’s been working with other organizations to encourage local election administrators and law enforcement to develop plans “for the safety of their staff, polling locations and equipment.” “Election misinformation, disinformation, the stuff that’s happening across the state, is harming and putting at risk our election officials, our election judges, our election volunteers and poll-watchers in the coming elections,” he said, adding, “someone needs to stand up and say Montanans need to be proud and feel good about the election practices we have in place and can feel confident about their vote.” Mangan cited potential threats directed at election officials in Carbon and Cascade counties, and asked the State Administration and Veterans Affairs Interim Committee to consider legislation that would enhance protections for election officials and judges against safety threats.

Full Article: Montana election officials report threats ahead of primary | 406 Politics | helenair.com

Montana: GOP lawmakers, activists go local with push for hand-counted ballots | Sam Wilson/Helena Independent Record

A self-described cyber security expert implicated in an alleged breach of a Colorado election system is touring Montana counties this week, the latest push by some Republican lawmakers to return the state to the days of hand-counting all its ballots. The local drive is part of a national effort spawned by unfounded voter fraud theories, but experts warn that eliminating ballot-processing machines could return elections to the days of widespread disenfranchisement and fraud that prompted the switch to machine-counting more than a century ago. Despite no documented instances of the machines being manipulated or hacked during any election, they’ve become top targets of right-wing activists who believe the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Lawmakers in at least six other states have introduced legislation to prohibit the use of machines during elections, and at least one such bill draft has been requested for Montana’s 2023 legislative session. Seated in a gray polo shirt and a white Maserati baseball cap, Mark Cook on Monday spent well over two hours telling the Ravalli County Commissioners that their election system is in jeopardy. Cook said his expertise entails helping software companies uncover vulnerabilities in their systems. Following the contention over the results of the 2020 election, he said he began looking at the infrastructure of election systems across the country, and was “absolutely shocked” when he quickly discovered major security flaws.

Full Article: GOP lawmakers, activists go local with push for hand-counted ballots | 406 Politics | helenair.com

New Jersey bill to allow for early mail ballot counting fails in Senate | Matt Friedman/Politico

A bill that would allow elections officials to count votes ahead of Election Day failed in the state Senate on Thursday. After a relatively lengthy debate during which a bipartisan group of senators raised concerns about the legislation, Senate President Nick Scutari pulled the measure from the board after its total hung at 20 yes votes to 16 no votes — one vote short of passage. The bill, NJ S856 (22R), would allow county boards of elections to open and count mail-in ballots beginning 10 days before Election Day and for county clerks to tally in-person early votes 24 hours after that voting period ends. Vote counting was slow in some counties in last year’s election. Because of that, high-profile politicians like Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli and Senate President Steve Sweeney took more than a week to concede their races. The bill is similar to a measure that was put in place for only the 2020 election, which was conducted almost entirely by mail-in ballot because of the pandemic. But while there were no reported problems with that law, several senators — including one Democrat — raised concerns about results leaking out and giving certain candidates advantages, even though doing so would be a third-degree crime.

Full Article: Bill to allow for early vote counting fails in New Jersey Senate – POLITICO

Pennsylvania: National GOP intervenes in Senate race vote-counting lawsuit | arc Levy/Associated Press

The national and state Republican parties are taking the same side as celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s neck-and-neck GOP primary contest for U.S. Senate and opposing a lawsuit that could help former hedge fund CEO David McCormick close the gap in votes. McCormick’s lawsuit was filed late Monday, less than 24 hours before Tuesday’s deadline for counties to report their unofficial results to the state. In it, McCormick asks the state Commonwealth Court to require counties to obey a brand-new federal appeals court decision and promptly count mail-in ballots that lack a required handwritten date on the return envelope. Oz, who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump, has pressed counties not to count the ballots and the Republican National Committee and state GOP said they would go to court to oppose McCormick. In a statement, the RNC’s chief counsel, Matt Raymer, said “election laws are meant to be followed, and changing the rules when ballots are already being counted harms the integrity of our elections.” Meanwhile, Tuesday, Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration issued guidance to counties saying that any ballots without dates must be counted, citing the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision from Friday.

Full Article: GOP intervenes in Pa. Senate race vote-counting lawsuit | AP News

Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Dean Knudson abruptly resigns, citing ‘deep desire’ from Republicans that he not chair of the panel | Shawn Johnson/Wisconsin Public Radio

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has delayed a vote to pick a new chair after Republican Commissioner Dean Knudson abruptly announced his resignation from the six-member panel, saying it had been made clear to him “from the highest levels of the Republican Party” that they didn’t want him to lead the body. Knudson, a former Republican state lawmaker who was appointed to the WEC by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, made the announcement Wednesday, just moments before commissioners were scheduled to vote on a new chair. Knudson said he would put his conservative record up against anyone in Wisconsin, but said he’d been branded a “RINO” for his work on the commission, referencing the acronym that stands for “Republican In Name Only.” Knudson said that was partly because of the way he values personal integrity. “And to me that integrity demands acknowledging the truth, even when the truth is painful,” Knudson told commissioners. “In this case, the painful truth is that President (Donald) Trump lost the election in 2020, lost the election in Wisconsin in 2020, and the loss was not due to election fraud.”

Full Article: Elections Commissioner Dean Knudson abruptly resigns, citing ‘deep desire’ from Republicans that he not chair of the panel | Wisconsin

Wyoming: Park County denies ballot hand-count proposal | Maggie Mullen/Casper Star Tribune

The Park County Commissioners will not approve a proposal by Park County Republican Men’s Club to hand-count ballots in the 2022 elections, but the proposal remains in play. The commission followed the counsel of Park County and Prosecuting Attorney Bryan Skoric, who advised against the proposal, citing several apparent conflicts with Wyoming election statutes as well as federal law. The commission will now consider whether to approve a request to hand-count ballots from the previous election instead, pending an opinion from the Wyoming Attorney General. Wyoming uses paper ballots and tallies them with electronic counting machines. The Park County Republican Men’s Club proposed counting those ballots by hand, characterizing it as a way to reassure voters of the accuracy of the machines. Since then, Park County has become a focal point in a statewide conversation about election integrity. While maintaining that Wyoming’s elections are fair, efficient and free from tampering, election officials agree that voter confidence in the process needs a boost. Hand-counting ballots, however, is not a legal solution, according to the county attorney.

Full Article: Park County denies ballot hand-count proposal | 307 Politics | trib.com