North Dakota: ​State strips then delays Native voting rights | High Plains Reader

Men in state government and on the U.S. Supreme Court crippled Native suffrage recently, but women are leading the fight to bring Native votes in record numbers to the polls. Some women are offering rides on Election Day to Natives lacking transportation. Others are filming videos on social media trying to explain what Native people need to prepare for ahead of time. Secretary of State promises to handle address switches from a post office box to a physical address are failing as multiple sources have reported waiting for three weeks to hear back from a county 911 coordinator. On October 9 the U.S. Supreme court voted 6 – 2 to disallow post office boxes as valid addresses to use while voting in North Dakota. All identification papers must have a physical address, which means many Native IDs are useless.

Utah: Voters find names no longer registered; state can’t explain why | KUTV

Registered voters say their names vanished from a state-run database. “We had gone online, to my surprise, to find out that I was not registered,” said 21-year-old voter Michael Peterson. Peterson says his mom asked the family to check their registration status online before the upcoming elections, and that’s when they found Michael’s name gone. It came as a shock because Peterson voted two years ago. His initial reaction was to feel like “it really feels unfair and it just doesn’t feel right, everyone should always be included,” Peterson said. In July, Peterson moved across town. He said he went to the DMV to get a new license and chose to keep his voter registration the same. “The information that we had in our database did not match the current address,” said Justin Lee, the Utah director of elections.

Wisconsin: ‘One Person, No Vote’ Highlights Impact Of Voter Suppression Laws | WUWM

At the founding of the United States, the right to vote belonged to a privileged few. White, male, property owners were the only people directly steering the fate of this nation. It took significant struggles to change that. The Civil War, women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement were just pieces of the complex web of events that gave most adult U.S. citizens the right to vote. But progress isn’t always linear. There have been significant efforts to suppress the voting population over the last two decades. Gerrymandering, restrictive voter ID laws, and purged voter rolls have all led to the disenfranchisement of many citizens. Carol Anderson is the author of, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy chronicles the history of voter suppression in the U.S. and the ways that modern politicians are trying to suppress the vote in states throughout the country. Wisconsin plays a starring role in the book. “There are a couple of ground zeros for this and Wisconsin, unfortunately, is one of them,” says Anderson. 

Afghanistan: Bomb Kills At Least 22 At Election Rally For Afghan Woman Candidate | RFE/RL

Afghan officials say at least 22 people have been killed — including civilians and members of the Afghan security forces — by a bomb that exploded at an election campaign rally for a woman who is running for parliament in the northeast of the country. Ahmad Jawad Hijri, a spokesman for the governor of Takhar Province, said 36 people were wounded in the attack in Rustaq district. He earlier told RFE/RL that the death toll could rise because many of the wounded were in critical condition. Khalil Aser, a spokesman for the provincial police chief, said at least 32 people were wounded by the blast.

Germany: Bavaria election: Merkel’s conservative allies humiliated | The Guardian

Angela Merkel’s conservative partners in Bavaria have had their worst election performance for more than six decades, in a humiliating state poll result that is likely to further weaken Germany’s embattled coalition government. The Christian Social Union secured 37.2% of the vote, preliminary results showed, losing the absolute majority in the prosperous southern state it had had almost consistently since the second world war. The party’s support fell below 40% for the first time since 1954. Markus Söder, the prime minister of Bavaria, called it a “difficult day” for the CSU, but said his party had a clear mandate to form a government. Among the main victors was the environmental, pro-immigration Green party, which as predicted almost doubled its voter share to 17.5% at the expense of the Social Democratic party (SPD), which lost its position as the second-biggest party, with support halving to 9.7%.

India: US scientists ‘hack’ electronic voting machines ahead of polls in 5 states: Report | Business Today

The Election Commission of India announced the dates for Assembly polls in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Telangana last week. Along with the dates, the poll regulating authority in India announced that VVPAT-enabled electronic voting machines will be used during these polls. Additionally, the country is looking at an eventful General Elections in 2019. Now, with barely a month left before states go to elections, scientists at the University of Michigan claim to have found a way to ‘hack’ Indian EVMs. A video posted online showed the scientists at the US university supposedly manipulating voting results on an electronic voting machine (EVM) via mobile text messages after attaching a home-made device to the machine, a BBC News report said.

Luxembourg: Election delivers uncertain outcome | Reuters

Luxembourg voters delivered an uncertain outcome in an election on Sunday, leaving the liberal-led coalition with just enough seats to stay in government and the traditionally dominant center-right also capable of returning to power. Opinion polls had indicated that the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV) – which was led for 19 years by EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker – would end Xavier Bettel’s five years as prime minister of a three-party coalition. The CSV was on course to be the largest party, but actually lost seats, according to a projection by broadcaster RTL after more than 90 percent of the votes were counted.

Maldives: Opposition supporters protest as court reviews election challenge | Reuters

Hundreds of Maldivians protested on Sunday demanding the arrest of defeated President Abdulla Yameen as its top court began to hear a petition challenging the outcome of last’s month election in the island nation. The tourist archipelago has been in political turmoil since February, when a state of emergency was imposed by Yameen, whose critics have accused him of running Maldives with an iron fist, jailing political opponents and Supreme Court judges. “This is our right. They can’t change it. They can’t play around with the votes,” Abidha Afeef, a 55-year old protester told Reuters. “Yameen has to go.”

Pakistan: By-election: Hackers target website of Internet voting | Dunya News

The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) on Sunday has foiled 12,000 hacking attacks on the internet voting website that was made to facilitate the overseas Pakistanis to exercise their voting right. According to details, hackers attempted almost 1200 times to harm the website however, NADRA successfully counter the attack and kept the website operational. More than 5,000 overseas Pakistani voters have cast their vote through Internet voting system. Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has granted permission to all registered overseas Pakistanis voters to have the right of casting vote in bye-election through I-voting system.

National: Online voting is a security nightmare, say experts | Fast Company

Online banking, ecommerce, e-filing taxes. Moving print documents and in-person services online–even those full of sensitive information–has been an inexorable trend for decades. And voting has moved in that direction too, in 32 U.S. states and several countries, starting in those simpler times of the 1990s and early 2000s. That was a giant security blunder, according to a new report from tech and election experts that urges a return to good old paper ballots. “This is a position consistently that computer scientists have been saying for a decade, and computer scientists are the ones who you think would be the most favorable to the idea [of online voting] because, we invent the things.” So says Jeremy Epstein, vice chair of the U.S. Technology Policy Council at the ACM, billed as the largest association of computing experts.

National: Election security groups warn of cyber vulnerabilities for emailed ballots | The Hill

Election security groups are sounding the alarm about emailed ballots ahead of the November midterm elections, warning in a new report that PDF and JPEG ballot attachments sent to election officials could be exploited by hackers. The organizations, including watchdog group Common Cause, issued a report Wednesday that found election workers who receive emailed ballots are at risk of clicking on unsafe attachments, sent from unknown sources, that could contain malware. “In jurisdictions that receive ballots by PDF or JPEG attachment, election workers must routinely click on documents from unknown sources to process emailed or faxed ballots, exposing the computer receiving the ballots — and any other devices on the same network — to a host of cyberattacks that could be launched from a false ballot laden with malicious software,” the report says. “An infected false ballot would enter the server like any other ballot, but once opened, it would download malware that could give attackers backdoor access to the elections office’s network.”

National: Can Elections Be Hacked? Online Voting Threatens 32 States, Report Says | Newsweek

Voters cast a minimum of 100,000 ballots using insecure internet methods in the 2016 election, highlighting an overlooked threat to election integrity, according to a report released Wednesday. Thirty-two states permit some voters—primarily overseas military personnel—to return ballots by email, fax or internet, according to “Email and Internet Voting: The Overlooked Threat to Election Security,” a report produced by the Association for Computing Machinery, Common Cause, the National Election Defense Coalition and R Street. “There are two concerns with email voting,” in which ballots and voter identification information are typically attached as a PDF or JPEG. “One—the ballots can be intercepted and undetectably altered or deleted. This hack was performed at DEF CON in August. And it’s something academics have long known,” Susannah Goodman, one of the authors of the report, told Newsweek. “Second—emailed ballots can be easily spoofed in a spear phishing attack designed to put malware on a county election official’s computer.”

National: To Deter Foreign Hackers, Some States May Also Be Deterring Voters | NPR

A number of states are blocking web traffic from foreign countries to their voter registration websites, making the process harder for some U.S. citizens who live overseas to vote, despite the practice providing no real security benefits. On its face, the “geo-targeting” of foreign countries may seem like a solid plan: election officials around the country are concerned about foreign interference after Russia’s efforts leading up to the 2016 election, so blocking traffic to election websites from outside the United States might seem like an obvious defense starting point. But cybersecurity experts and voting rights advocates say it’s an ineffective solution that any hacker could easily sidestep using a virtual private network, or VPN, a commonly-used and easily-available service. Such networks allow for a computer user to use the Internet and appear in a different location than they actually are.

National: Can Paper Ballots Save Our Democracy? | Slate

In August at DEFCON, the annual hackers’ convention in Las Vegas, J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and an expert in cybersecurity, brought along several of his Diebold Accuvote TSX voting machines. The Accuvote is a touch-screen voting device known as a direct-recording electronic voting machine, which, as the name suggests, records votes and stores them on a memory device. Halderman’s machines were set up as part of the Voting Village, an area dedicated to the cybersecurity of voting machines, where visitors were asked to cast votes in a mock presidential election between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. “Because this is DEFCON, of course almost everyone thought they were clever and voted for Benedict Arnold,” said Halderman. At the end of the mock election, with over 100 votes cast, the machine produced the totals and the winner of the two-man race: the Dark Tangent.

National: Why federal courts may become the next front in the battle to secure our elections | The Hill

Last week, a team of security researchers who run the DefCon hacking convention released a report on voting machines in use around the country that contain structural flaws ripe for exploitation by hackers. Among its dismaying findings, DefCon reported a flaw in one widely used voting tabulator that, if hacked, “could enable an attacker to flip the Electoral College and determine the outcome of a presidential election.” Though it’s been nearly two years since the 2016 election, there remains a startling gap between the well understood need to secure our elections against cyberattacks and the reality on the ground. Computer security experts and leading intelligence and law enforcement voices have sounded the alarm on the persistent and serious threats facing election systems. Yet the actors best positioned to take broad action — state governments, Congress, and election system vendors — have moved slowly, and in some cases stalled.

National: Measure seeks to protect election systems from foreign foes | Associated Press

Foreign nationals would be prohibited from owning or controlling companies that support U.S. election systems under legislation introduced by two senators from Maryland, where officials learned this summer that a Russian oligarch is heavily invested in a company that maintains key parts of their state’s election infrastructure. Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin are sponsoring the “Protect Our Elections Act,” along with Republican Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine. “We cannot allow Russia or any other foreign adversaries to own our elections systems,” Van Hollen said. “This isn’t just a hypothetical issue — it happened right here in my home state of Maryland.”

Arkansas: State Supreme Court upholds revised voter ID law | Associated Press

Arkansas’ highest court on Thursday upheld a voter ID law that is nearly identical to a restriction struck down by the court four years ago. The 5-2 decision from the Arkansas Supreme Court means the law, which requires voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot, will remain in effect in this year’s midterm election. Unlike the measure struck down in 2014, the law approved last year allows voters to cast provisional ballots without a photo ID if they sign a sworn statement confirming their identities. Opponents of the new measure had argued that it circumvented the 2014 ruling. But justices on Thursday said lawmakers had the power to enact the restriction by labeling it a change to a constitutional amendment related to voter registration requirements and was “therefore constitutional.”

Florida: Judge rules against Florida Democrats on extending voter registration | Tampa Bay Times

A federal judge has rejected a request from the Florida Democratic Party to force the state to extend a voter-registration deadline because of Hurricane Michael. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle turned down the party’s request for a temporary restraining order to extend the registration deadline to Oct. 16, a week later than the original Tuesday deadline. The party contended an extension was needed because the hurricane, which devastated parts of the Panhandle on Wednesday, could prevent people from registering to vote in the Nov. 6 election. Secretary of State Ken Detzner this week issued a directive authorizing county elections supervisors whose offices were closed Tuesday to accept paper registration applications on the day that their offices reopen. Detzner did not extend a Tuesday night deadline for voters to register online.

Florida: ‘A mess’: Florida’s online voter-registration system panned | Politico

As a hurricane threatened Florida, Gov. Rick Scott balked at extending Tuesday’s voter registration deadline for a week as Democrats want, in part because the state has an online system to sign up new voters. But thousands of Floridians have told some elections supervisors in recent days that the system isn’t working — despite claims from the state that the problems had been fixed and that the effort has been “immensely successful.” “A mess!” Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher told POLITICO by email. Florida Democrats are suing Scott’s secretary of state, Ken Detzner, in federal court to extend Florida’s voter registration deadline, which is Tuesday, for at least a week due to the approach of Hurricane Michael.

Georgia: Lawsuit challenges 53,000 stalled Georgia voter registrations | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A federal lawsuit filed Thursday challenges a Georgia law that has stalled the voter registrations of more than 53,000 potential voters until they verify their basic information. The lawsuit, brought by several civil rights groups, asks a judge to overturn Georgia’s “exact match” law, which requires voter registration information to match driver’s licenses, state ID cards or Social Security records. The legal action comes after The Associated Press reported this week that at least 53,000 voter registrations were flagged because of the law. Those voter registrations are on hold because of discrepancies between application information and government records, such as a missing hyphen in a last name or data entry errors. But potential voters can still participate in this year’s elections if they show photo ID either when they go to vote or beforehand. They can also mail identification to county election officials in advance. If their ID resolves the discrepancy, they will immediately become active voters eligible to cast a normal ballot on Georgia’s voting machines.

Georgia: Democrat Abrams demands GOP’s Kemp resign as Georgia secretary of state amid ‘voter suppression’ uproar | CNN

Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams’ campaign is calling on Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp to resign following a report his office is using a controversial verification law to effectively suppress the minority vote in their race to become the state’s next governor. The demand from the Abrams campaign comes in response to an Associated Press report on records it obtained showing Georgia has put a hold on more than 53,000 voter registration applications — nearly seven-in-ten of them belonging to African Americans — because they failed to clear the state’s “exact match” standard. Under the policy, even the most minor discrepancy — like a typo or missing letter — between a voter’s registration and their drivers license, social security or state ID cards can be flagged.

Guam: Guam pushes for native-only vote on US relationship | Associated Press

The question before a panel of U.S. appeals court judges: Should non-native residents of Guam have a say in the territory’s future relationship with the United States? Three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals were at the University of Hawaii’s law school Wednesday to listen to arguments in an appeal of a federal judge’s 2017 ruling that says limiting the vote to those who are considered native inhabitants of the island is unconstitutional. Voters would have three choices: independence, statehood and free association with the United States similar to island states that allow the U.S. exclusive military access to their land and waters while their citizens have the right to live and work in the U.S.

Kansas: With 3.5 weeks until election, Johnson County gets certification for update to voting machine software that caused reporting delays in August | Shawnee Mission Post

Officials have signed off on a patched version of the software program that will power Johnson County’s voting system next month. The question is, will it work? A month and a half after the company announced it had rewritten the portion of its software program that led to massive reporting delays in the August primary elections, Election Systems & Software has received federal and state certification for the software’s use in the Nov. 6 general election, Johnson County announced today. ES&S submitted the corrected software program to the Election Assistance Commission for review on Sept. 5 and received notice of certification on Oct. 4. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office announced today that it was granting state certification to the system as well.

Louisiana: State’s lucrative voting machine contract award canceled | Associated Press

Louisiana is voiding a multimillion-dollar contract award to replace thousands of voting machines after a key official in Gov. John Bel Edwards’ administration found flaws in the vendor selection. Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s office will have to redo the bid process for the lucrative work if the decision by Louisiana’s chief procurement officer Paula Tregre stands. “I hereby determine that it is in the best interest of the state to rescind the award made to Dominion Voting Systems,” Tregre said in a 17-page decision released Wednesday night. The decision comes at an unfortunate time for Ardoin, a Republican in office since May who is running in a November special election to remain in the job. Running on his experience, Ardoin has defended the bid evaluators’ pick of Dominion and suggested criticism was “baloney” while opponents have panned his handling of the voting machine replacement.

New Jersey: 10,000 voters got mail-in ballots with errors in them | NJ.com

About 10,000 of the vote-by-mail ballots that the Middlesex County Clerk’s office sent out last weekend contained errors in the recipients’ addresses, authorities said. County Clerk Elaine Flynn said several confused residents called the her office, wondering why their information was listed incorrectly and worried their vote wouldn’t be counted if they sent their ballot back. (One of our very own NJ Advance Media reporters was even the recipient of a wrongly-addressed mailer). “The ballots are valid, and the voters should use the materials they received,” Cassandra Achille, supervisor of the election division, said in a written statement. Achille assured recipients that their returned ballots would be counted.

Ohio: Federal judge deals another blow to group challenging voter roll purge | Cleveland Plain Dealer

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that notification forms Ohio sends to voters in its process to remove inactive voters from its rolls are compliant with federal law, dealing another blow to a group challenging the state’s voter purge process. The groups suing Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said all voters the state deleted from its rolls from 1995 through 2016 through a disputed process were actually removed unlawfully because the state’s notices for removal didn’t comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Senior U.S. District Judge George Smith disagreed in an opinion issued Wednesday, largely ruling against the plaintiffs and saying the forms complied with federal law. He struck down arguments from the plaintiffs that said voters weren’t told of the deadlines to respond to the forms and weren’t informed of the consequences of failing to respond.

Texas: Can Hackers Mess With Texas’s Elections? | Texas Monthly

When we think about those who defend the territorial integrity of our nation and state, we tend to imagine well-equipped members of the U.S. armed forces, or perhaps a square-jawed detachment of Texas Rangers. Increasingly, however, the twenty-first century battle for control of the American homeland is being fought in the computerized elections systems overseen by our humble county clerks.

Here in Texas, votes in federal and state elections are tallied independently by 254 local officials, one in each county seat, from big cities like Houston and Dallas to tiny courthouse towns like Tahoka and Floydada. If a hostile country decides to hack an election in Texas, that means pitting Russia’s (or Iran’s or North Korea’s or China’s) most skilled hackers against a group of officials and volunteers who may not even know their way around an iPhone. “We’re asking county clerks, and for that matter local poll workers, to defend against a nation-state adversary,” says Dan Wallach, computer science professor at Rice and expert on election security issues. “That’s not a fair fight.”

Afghanistan: Without voting rights, Afghan refugees face political alienation | Deutsche Welle

Afghan refugees living in Iran and Pakistan continue to face an uncertain future, and the upcoming parliamentary election on October 20 doesn’t seem to solve any of their problems. As these refugees are not allowed to vote in the polls, they feel they will have no influence over the legislators in the next parliament. There is little incentive for these people to return to their homeland. A lack of security in Afghanistan and Kabul’s reluctance to support them hinder their return. Authorities in Islamabad and Tehran urge the Afghan government to take back refugees, as they consider them a burden on their economy. But many of these refugees have been living in the neighboring countries for decades and despite various problems in the host nations, Iran and Pakistan are still a better option for them.

Bosnia: Bosnian Croat nationalists protest election of moderate | Associated Press

Several thousand Bosnian Croat nationalist supporters on Thursday protested the election of a moderate politician to the Croat seat in Bosnia’s three-person presidency. The crowd marched through the ethnically divided southern town of Mostar holding banners reading “Not my president” and “RIP democracy” to protest Zeljko Komsic’s victory. Bosnia’s presidency also has a Muslim and a Serb member. A peace deal that ended Bosnia’s 1992-95 ethnic war created a Muslim-Croat region and a Serb region held together in a central government. Komsic advocates strengthening Bosnia’s unity. Nationalist are disputing his win in an election Sunday, saying he was backed by Muslim voters and does not represent Croats.

Brazil: ‘Flowering of hate’: bitter election brings wave of political violence to Brazil | The Guardian

The two contenders in Brazil’s bitterly-contested presidential race have urged calm after a wave of attacks on journalists, activists and members of the LGBT community by supporters of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro including beatings, a knife attack and a murder. Supporters of the former paratrooper – himself the victim of a botched assassination attempt last month – have also reportedly been targeted with violence. But an investigation by independent journalism group Agência Publica found that an overwhelming majority of the violence was committed by supporters of Bolsonaro, who polls give a 16-point lead over his leftist opponent, Fernando Haddad, ahead of the second round runoff on 28 October.