Sri Lanka: A dubious do-over: Sri Lanka’s president calls a snap election | The Economist

Maithripala Sirisena, Sri Lanka’s president, abruptly dissolved parliament on November 9th and called a snap general election. The move capped several weeks of political drama in the Indian Ocean republic as the president has tested—many would say has greatly exceeded—the constitutional limits of his power. The action began on October 26th, when Mr Sirisena abruptly sacked Ranil Wickremesinghe, the elected prime minister and also his ostensible political ally in the ruling coalition. He replaced him with Mahinda Rajapaksa (pictured), a former strongman president whose regime Mr Sirisena had loudly accused of corruption and even of having plotted to kill him. The flip-flopping president also suspended parliament for three weeks to avoid a debate on his actions, and began to swear in new ministers. The suspension of parliament was widely seen as an indication that the new prime minister did not have the support of majority of MPs.

Ukraine: Rebel regions vote in ballot that West calls bogus | Associated Press

Residents of the eastern Ukraine regions controlled by Russia-backed separatist rebels voted Sunday for local governments in elections denounced by Kiev and the West. The elections were to choose heads of government and legislature members in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, where separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since the spring of 2014 in a war that has killed more than 10,000 people. Although a 2015 accord on ending the war calls for local elections in Donetsk and Luhansk, critics including Ukraine’s president, the U.S. and the European Union say the vote is illegitimate because it is conducted where Ukraine has no control. But the separatists say the vote is a key step toward establishing full-fledged democracy in the regions.

Florida: Something Very Odd Happened With Broward County’s Ballots in the Florida Senate Election | Slate Kim

Florida has retained the championship belt for election shenanigans, as three statewide races could be headed for a recount. The gap between Rick Scott and Bill Nelson, in the election for the latter’s Senate seat, has only continued to narrow. The race was already within the 0.5 percent margin needed to trigger a recount on Wednesday, when Scott had roughly a 35,000-vote lead. That’s been cut in half to about 17,000 as ballots have continued to come in. While Scott is still the favorite to ultimately win, FiveThirtyEight has shifted the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.” One reason for hope for Nelson is that a traditionally Democratic area, Broward County, has so far reported fewer votes for the Senate race compared with the gubernatorial race, according to data compiled by MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki. In other Florida counties, no such discrepancy exists. While some of the discrepancy could be due to genuine undervotes—for instance, the design of the ballot may have led some voters to miss it and not vote in that race—it’s possible that the county hasn’t correctly counted all the ballots. About 24,000 ballots in Broward County registered a vote in the governor’s race but not for the Senate race.

National: Midterm Voting Exposes Growing Problem of Aging Machines | Associated Press

Election experts have long warned about the nation’s aging fleet of voting equipment. This week’s elections underscored just how badly upgrades are needed. Across the country, reports poured in Tuesday amid heavy voter turnout of equipment failing or malfunctioning, triggering frustration among voters and long lines at polling places. Scanners used to record ballots broke down in New York City. Voting machines stalled or stopped working in Detroit. Electronic poll books used to check in voters failed in Georgia. Machines failed to read ballots in Wake County, North Carolina, as officials blamed humidity and lengthy ballots. Those problems followed a busy early voting period that revealed other concerns, including machines that altered voters’ choices in Texas, North Carolina and Georgia.

National: Cybersecurity officials start focusing on the 2020 elections | Associated Press

An unprecedented federal and state collaboration to defend election systems against Russian interference ended with no obvious voting system compromises, although it’s not entirely clear why. Federal officials are wondering whether foreign agents are saving their ammunition for the 2020 presidential showdown or planning a late-stage misinformation campaign to claim Tuesday’s election had been tainted. It doesn’t change how vulnerable most states are to possible interference. “They’ve shown will, they’ve shown the capability,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said. “I certainly can’t speak to why they’re doing or not doing something. But I would just offer to put it in a broader perspective — they have a full-court press through many means … to try to affect our democracy.” In a news conference Wednesday after Democrats won control of the House, President Donald Trump said his administration worked hard to shore up elections and he’d issue a report soon on the effort.

National: Why Securing Elections Requires a Little Bit of Zero-Trust | StateTech

As the country digests the results of this year’s midterm elections, the concerns that were raised about the potential risk of cybersecurity threats to our voting systems remain. This year, Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 to make nearly $400 million available to the states to improve their administration of federal elections. I’ve met with secretaries of state, state IT leaders and local government officials across the country who were intensely focused on how to use this assistance to shore up election systems cybersecurity. Having served in state IT leadership for much of my career, I know how important it is to spend resources wisely and emphasize solutions that address the core issues of a challenge, versus simply applying a Band-Aid to solve it. Because our voting system is multifaceted, potential solutions to the election security challenge require a deeper focus on infrastructure. Even though the election is over, states should see election security as a year-round effort. States are the architects and supervisors of their respective election systems, and they execute this important constituent service in varying ways. Some states vote exclusively by mail, while others rely exclusively on electronic voting machines. Other states have a combination of voting options available to constituents in different localities.

National: After a stressful election, experts warn blockchain is not the answer | NBC

Experts this week warned against entertaining the idea that blockchain could fix the voting system despite growing frustration with the long lines and malfunctioning machines that caused problems during the midterm election. “If you’re trying to convince Walmart it needs blockchains to track avocados or whatever, be our guest,” Arvind Narayanan, an associate professor of computer science at Princeton, tweeted. “But if you’re messing with critical infrastructure, you’ve crossed a line.” Blockchain is technology that uses computers to build a shared, secure and decentralized digital ledger. Blockchain is best known as the basis for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin but in recent years has attracted interest from a variety of industries that see a benefit in using the ideas behind blockchain.

National: DHS Wants to Expand the Reach of Its Critical Infrastructure Cyber Training | Nextgov

The Homeland Security Department wants to surge its ability to train critical infrastructure owners and operators on cybersecurity, according to a contracting document released Wednesday. The department is seeking a video conferencing service that it can use to provide cybersecurity webinars to 5,000 or more critical infrastructure operators simultaneously, according to the contracting document. The term critical infrastructure refers to 16 sectors the government has determined are vital to the nation’s successful operation. They include hospitals, banks, energy plants, dams and transportation hubs such as airports and train stations. The department officially designated election infrastructure, such as voting machines and voter rolls, critical infrastructure in January 2017, after Russian efforts to breach those systems during the 2016 elections.

National: Democrats tech boss can’t guarantee midterms were hack-free | Yahoo

The Democrats’ top cybersecurity boss said he cannot guarantee the midterm elections earlier this week were hack-free. “Good news is we didn’t hear very much on that day,” said Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer of the Democratic National Committee, on Thursday. “But remember, any sophisticated attack is not something we’re going to detect today. It’s something we’re going to detect a few days from now, or a few weeks … or a few months from now, as we go through our logs and try to understand what really happened.” Krikorian made his first public remarks since the US midterms at the annual Web Summit tech event in Lisbon, Portugal. Krikorian leads a team of 35 technology and security specialists tasked with protecting the Democrats and the party’s tech infrastructure. He was previously a top executive at Uber and pioneered self-driving technology at the ride-sharing company. Prior to Uber, he worked as a top engineering executive at Twitter (TWTR).

National: Mid-terms 2018: When voting goes wrong | BBC

After celebration of historic wins by diverse candidates, the other big online trend for the US mid-term election was claims of massive and deliberate vote suppression. Reddit’s top post was an unverified video of apparent errors at a ballot machine in Indiana, while reports of hours-long queues, broken ballot machines and intimidation spread on Twitter and Facebook. A Google map of live election-related searches showed spikes in interest in provisional ballots and long waiting lines across the country. And in Florida, a church that serves as a polling station was criticised after posting a sign discouraging voters to choose Democrats, reported local media. Some reported cases were simple technical errors. In Ohio, one widely-shared claim of vote rigging turned out to be caused by a temporary paper jam.

National: Three States Pass Sweeping Voting Rights Expansions | Roll Call

Voting rights activists are celebrating after voters in three states approved sweeping election reforms in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Voters in Florida, Michigan and Nevada all passed major reforms to their states’ election systems, which will make voting easier and extend ballot access to millions of new voters. Florida’s Amendment 4, approved by 64 percent of voters, will restore voting rights to more than 1 million residents convicted of certain felonies. About 10 percent of Florida adults will be newly eligible to vote, of which a disproportionate number are African-Americans. Meanwhile, Nevada and Michigan both passed automatic voter registration measures Tuesday, meaning residents in future elections will be added to voting rolls when they obtain or renew a driver’s license or conduct other business with the state, unless they opt out. 

National: Foreign adversaries will ‘continue to push misinformation’ after Election Day, official says | The Washington Post

Election Day is over, but government officials are still watching out for potential interference in the political process after detecting online disinformation that was meant to undermine yesterday’s midterms. Foreign adversaries will “continue to push misinformation” even after the election results are fully reported, a Department of Homeland Security official told reporters in a series of briefings on election security that lasted well into the night. While DHS made clear it did not detect any breaches that would affect the casting or counting of votes, the official expressed concerns that bad actors could create the perception that the election was not secure — or  “enhancing or overstating” how successful hacking attempts were.  “We’re talking about propaganda machines,” the official said, “that are trying to divide the American people and undermine their confidence in election systems.”

National: Threats remain to US voting system – and voters’ perceptions of reality | The Conversation

As the 2018 midterms proceed, there are still significant risks to the integrity of the voting system – and information warfare continues to try to influence the American public’s choices when they cast their ballots. On the day of the election, there were a number of early hitches in voting at individual polling places, such as polling places opening late and vote-counting machines not plugged in. But there seem not – at least not yet – to be major problems across the country. However, not all the election-related news and information voters have been encountering in recent days and weeks is accurate, and some of it is deliberately misleading. As this election’s results come back, they will reveal whether the misinformation and propaganda campaigns conducted alongside the political ones were effective. America’s electoral process remains highly fragmented, because of the country’s cherished tradition of decentralized government and local control. While this may leave some individual communities’ voting equipment potentially vulnerable to attack, the nation’s voting process overall may be more trustworthy as a result of this fragmentation. With no unified government agency or office to provide, administer and protect election technologies, there’s not one central national element that could fail or be attacked.

Arizona: Court hearing set in Senate race vote count dispute | Associated Press

As the Arizona Senate vote count starts to tip into Democratic terrain, a judge Friday will hear a lawsuit by the GOP seeking to limit the tally — or expand it in the state’s conservative-leaning rural areas. Four local Republican parties filed a lawsuit Wednesday night challenging the state’s two biggest counties for allowing voters to help resolve problems with their mail-in ballot signatures after Election Day. If the signature on the voter registration doesn’t match that on the sealed envelope, both Maricopa and Pima County allow voters to help them fix, or “cure” it, up to five days after Election Day. Many other counties only allow voters to cure until polls close on Election Day.

Arkansas: Ballots mixed in few state elections; some voters hit ID snags at polls | Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Phillips County voters said they cast the wrong ballots in the Marvell mayoral election Tuesday because ballots for people inside and outside the city limits were mixed up. In the highly contested race for Marvell mayor, rural voters received city ballots and city voters got county ballots. The county ballots did not include candidates for mayor. Amanda Moody, who lives in the city, said she went to vote about 8 a.m. and realized after voting that she hadn’t been able to vote for mayor. There are three candidates in this year’s election. “I just hope something gets rectified,” Moody said.

California: California doesn’t need better voting machines — it needs better audits, experts say | The Peninsula Press

When voters in Alameda and Santa Clara County head to the polls on Nov. 6, about one percent will cast their ballots on electronic voting machines that have known security vulnerabilities. California has safeguards in place. In addition to requiring paper records for votes cast on electronic machines, California also manually audits one percent of all ballots cast, to make sure there’s no discrepancy in the numbers. Now, experts like David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford and founder of Verified Voting, are saying that isn’t enough, and are pushing states like California to implement more rigorous auditing methods. “The problem of protecting machines is pretty unmanageable, even with the best and most modern hardware … so what you need to do is select a bunch of ballots at random and hand count them in order to make sure the electronic counts are accurate,” says Dill.

Florida: Recount possible in Scott-Nelson race for Senate seat | Miami Herald

Nothing comes easy in Florida elections. The tightest U.S. Senate race since at least the 1970s was too close to call on election night and now appears headed for a recount. Republican Gov. Rick Scott was clinging to a 25,920-vote advantage over Democratic incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson as of Wednesday evening — or just 0.32 percent of the 8.1 million ballots cast by Floridians. State law allows for a machine recount of the results if the two candidates are separated by one-half of a percentage point or less. The race is well within that margin. “We are proceeding to a recount,” Nelson said in his only public remarks since results started coming in Tuesday.

Florida: Facing national microscope again, Florida braces for several recounts | Tampa Bay Times

Florida’s chief legal officer, Secretary of State Ken Detzner, told county election supervisors Thursday to plan for statewide recounts and for extraordinary public and media scrutiny in the state with the singular status of unusually close elections. “The recounts will be nationally watched … (we’re) under a microscope,” Detzner said on a conference call with counties. Detzner did not specify a number of races. Statewide races for U.S. Senate and commissioner of agriculture are within the machine recount window of half of 1 percent, according to incomplete and unofficial statewide returns. A third race, for governor, is at present slightly outside that threshold. Detzner’s boss, Gov. Rick Scott, is at the center of one of those possible recounts. Scott declared victory over Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson late on Tuesday in the Senate race, but the two men were separated on Thursday morning by .26 percent of more than 8 million votes.

Florida: In Broward County, fewer votes in Senate race raise recount questions | Miami Herald

As Florida’s bitterly narrow race for U.S. Senate appears it will meet the threshold for a lengthy manual recount, all eyes in the state are turning — yet again — to Broward County. Numbers being reported from one of the state’s bluest bastions are raising questions about why so many fewer voters appeared to choose a candidate in the U.S. Senate race, Florida’s most nationally prominent office on this year’s ballot. As of Thursday evening, 676,706 votes had been counted in Broward in the U.S. Senate race, according to the Broward Supervisor of Elections website, overwhelmingly for Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson over Republican Rick Scott. But nearly every other statewide office garnered more votes in Broward than the Senate race, particularly the contest for governor, with 24,763 more voters — 701,469 in all — weighing in.

Georgia: Kemp resigns as secretary of state, Abrams readies legal action | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Republican Brian Kemp on Thursday resigned as Georgia’s secretary of state as he sought to position himself as the “clear and convincing” winner of the race for governor. But Democrat Stacey Abrams is not conceding anything yet, hopeful that a trove of provisional ballots and other votes not yet recorded could be enough to force the tight race into a runoff.  Her campaign unveiled a litigation team poised to take the fight to the courts as it continues a hunt for an additional 25,632 Abrams votes that will push the race into runoff territory. Kemp’s office has said there are roughly 25,000 outstanding provisional and absentee ballots — making his lead virtually insurmountable — and on Thursday he released for the first time a detailed accounting of where each was cast. “The votes are not there for her,” Kemp said. “I respect the hard-fought race she ran. But we won the race, and we’re moving forward.”

Indiana: FBI asked to investigate Porter County’s trouble with counting votes | Indianapolis Star

The commissioners in a northwestern Indiana county plagued by a mix of Election Day problems asked the FBI on Wednesday to investigate what they called “scores of alleged violations of Indiana Election Law” reported following Tuesday’s election. Porter County has released no election results, and officials did not begin counting votes until Wednesday morning, more than 15 hours after the first polling places closed. The delay was holding up final election results in three state legislative races, those for House districts 4 and 19 and Senate District 7. The commissioners’ office said in a statement late Wednesday afternoon that the commissioners had asked the FBI to investigate the alleged election violations reported “by poll workers, voters and the public.” The commissioners’ statement did not specify what those alleged violations involved.

South Carolina: Voting snafus renew calls for new voting machines in South Carolina | The Greenville News

Following an election highlighted by long lines at the polls and reports of broken voting machines, programming errors and machines that switched votes for some candidates, voting rights advocates have renewed calls for the state Legislature to replace South Carolina’s aging voting machines. The state’s 13,000 voting machines have been in use since 2004 and use pre-2004 technology. South Carolina is one of five states that still uses machines that directly record votes without providing a paper trail to follow in the case of disputed elections or investigations of vote tampering. And in an election in which voters in Richland and York counties reported their votes being switched after they’d made a selection, the ACLU of South Carolina and the South Carolina Progressive Network have once again called on lawmakers to upgrade the system.

South Carolina: USC professor raises concerns over South Carolina voting equipment | WLTX

WLTX has done several stories in recent weeks about voting equipment issues in Richland county and concern over the state’s aging voting equipment. A USC computer science professor, known for critiquing the state’s aging voting equipment, is another voice calling for change before 2020. “I think in order to restore trust in elections, we need to get as much technology out of this process as possible,” Duncan Buell said in his faculty office on Thursday. Buell, a USC computer science professor with a doctorate in mathematics, has been auditing state election results independently for years. He and the South Carolina State Election Commission started separate audits in 2010. “We have seen a significant improvement, I think, in the quality of the process since 2010,” Buell added in his office. Buell said a 2010 Democratic senate primary caused concern due to issues with vote counts in some counties. Together with others, like the League of Women Voters, Buell started individual audits. In 2016, Buell said the data was, “really very very clean.”

Bahrain: Election condemned after opposition ban | The Guardian

Upcoming parliamentary elections in Bahrain have been deprived of any legitimacy by a ban on opposition parties, legislators in the US, UK, Ireland and the European parliament have declared in four separate letters calling on the country to end the repression. Bahrain, a former British colony ruled by the Sunni al-Khalifa royal family, is due to hold elections on 24 November for the Council of Representatives of Bahrain’s national assembly, one of the Gulf’s few democratic institutions. Bahrain’s assembly consists of an upper house appointed directly by King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa called the Shura or consultative council, and an elected council of representatives, the main lawmaking body, each with 40 seats. Nearly 366,000 citizens have been declared eligible to vote. Separately, members of the royal family hold 12 of the 26 posts in the cabinet. The other 14 posts are held by political appointees that are not members of the royal family.

Bangladesh: General election on December 23 despite Zia’s arrest | Al Jazeera

Authorities in Bangladesh have said they will hold a “free and fair” national election on December 23 despite bitter wrangling between the government and the opposition. Bangladesh’s Election Commission announced on Thursday that the election will take place despite the imprisonment of the leader of the main opposition party and the banning of its chief partner, Jamaat-e-Islami. “A favourable situation prevails in the country to hold a free and fair election,” Chief Election Commissioner Nurul Huda said in an address aired by state-run television and radio stations. Huda said he hoped all parties will participate in the election, in which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is seeking re-election.

Kosovo: Diaspora voting: infusing democracy in Kosovo | Prishtina Insight

While the economic, social and cultural contributions made by the Kosovo diaspora for their home country is well-recognized, their contribution to the direct democratic process – namely, elections – has been met with continuous obstacles. Kosovo citizens that live abroad are entitled to voting rights as per the country’s constitution. However, experience so far has shown that the voting process for diaspora members is complicated and riddled with technical, administrative and legal snags. In the best case scenario, diaspora members from Kosovo faced many difficulties while participating in the voting process. Worst case scenario, it can be said that they were denied a right guaranteed by the constitution and laws in force. Yet, these problems have had no proper resolution, because voting from abroad is seen as a secondary issue in the debate for electoral reform in Kosovo.

Madagascar: Former president alleges fraud in Madagascar vote | AFP

Former Madagascan president Hery Rajaonarimampianina on Thursday alleged that “many voting irregularities” pointed to fraud in this week’s election, heightening fears of protests and a disputed result. Early counting from a small number of polling stations put Rajaonarimampianina in a distant third place behind leading contenders Andry Rajoelina and Marc Ravalomanana, both also former presidents of the Indian Ocean island. “Many voting irregularities and technical anomalies have been detected including an invalid electoral register… intimidation (and) the presence of pre-ticked ballots,” said Rajaonarimampianina, who ruled from 2014 to September 2018.

Ukraine: Three Things Ukraine Must Do Now If It Wants Clean Elections Next Year | Atlantic Council

The parliament renewed Ukraine’s highest election body, the Central Election Commission, ahead of the crucial 2019 general elections. On September 20, the parliament replaced all 13 CEC members who were serving on expired terms. In a swift decision—too swift in the opinion of the opposition—the Rada expanded the membership of the CEC from 15 to 17. Parliament appointed fourteen presidential nominees, two members were carried over from the old CEC, and one seat was left vacant. Rada Speaker Andriy Parubiy and BPP representative Iryna Lutsenko both promised that a nominee from the Opposition Bloc will soon join. Thus, all parliamentary factions will be represented on the renewed CEC. This move can’t come soon enough. The country will hold its presidential election in March and parliamentary polls in October.

National: Broken machines, rejected ballots and long lines: voting problems emerge as Americans go to the polls. | The Washington Post

Civil rights groups and election officials fielded thousands of reports of voting irregularities across the country Tuesday, with voters complaining of broken machines, long lines and untrained poll workers improperly challenging Americans’ right to vote. The loudest of those complaints came from Georgia, where issues of race, ballot access and election fairness have fueled an acrimonious governor’s contest between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. Abrams, a former state lawmaker, would be the nation’s first black female governor, while Kemp, the secretary of state, who oversees elections, has faced accusations of trying to suppress the minority vote. In one downtown Atlanta precinct, voters waited three hours to cast ballots after local election officials initially sent only three voting machines to serve more than 3,000 registered voters. In suburban Gwinnett County, the wait surpassed four hours as election officials opened the polls only to discover that their voting machines were not working at all, voters said.

New York: Citywide Technical Difficulties Deter Some from Voting | CityLab

When Rebekah Burgess Abromovich got in line to vote at the North Henry Street polling center in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at 9:15 a.m. Tuesday morning, only two electronic voting scanners were working. After an hour of voting, the working machines were down to one. When she finally submitted her ballot more than three hours after arriving, volunteers had begun handing out emergency ballot boxes, which few understood how to use. “I was lucky because I was given the day off to vote,” she said. But other people were bailing. “I was standing next to a teacher who waited for two and a half hours, and then had to leave to teach a class. She said she had to come back.” In polling places in New York City’s five boroughs, similar stories of out-of-commission voting machines echoed: At different points on Tuesday, only one scanner worked at Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx, Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, and the Brooklyn Public Library polling station, according to NBC New York. At PS 22 in Prospect Heights, all four scanners broke for much of the morning, before getting fixed at 10 am. Elsewhere, ballot sleeves were missing. Lines stretched blocks and hours long.