National: $150M in federal funds for election security is already out the door | FCW

The initially turbulent relationship between federal agencies and state and local election officials in the wake of the 2016 election season has cleared to some extent as the groups work together ahead of upcoming elections, federal and state government officials told a Senate panel on election security. States are using up a pool of federal money to bolster their election systems, and the Department of Homeland Security is honing its threat sharing data to better fit the needs of states, the officials said at a June 20 Senate Rules and Administration Committee hearing on election cybersecurity. “As of this week, 38 states have requested $250 million” of the $380 million appropriation in the 2018 omnibus spending bill, panel Chairman Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said. He added that $150 million has already been distributed.

National: Obama cybersecurity czar: Russian hackers likely scanned election systems in all 50 states | USA Today

Russian hackers likely scanned the election systems of all 50 states for vulnerabilities in 2016 — not just the 21 states confirmed as targets by homeland security officials last year, the cybersecurity czar for former President Barack Obama told a Senate panel Wednesday. “I think it is highly likely,” Michael Daniel replied in answer to a question from Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, about whether Russian cyber actors at least scanned the election systems of every state. “It is more likely that we hadn’t detected it than that it didn’t occur.” States have been scrambling to improve their cyber security after Homeland Security officials revealed last year that Russian hackers tried to breach election systems in at least 21 states in 2016. Although no actual votes were changed, hackers broke into Illinois’ voter registration database.

National: State Election Officials Didn’t Know About Russian Hacking Threat Until They Read It in the News, Emails Show | HuffPost

Voters across the country were shocked to learn last year, through the disclosure of a top-secret NSA document, details of an intricate plot by Russian military hackers to infiltrate American electoral systems. New emails obtained by The Intercept through public records requests illustrate the disturbing extent to which potential targets of the attack were caught unaware, having apparently remained in the dark alongside the voting public. On June 5, 2017, The Intercept published a top-secret National Security Agency assessment that detailed and diagramed a Russian governmental plot to breach VR Systems, an e-voting vendor that makes poll book software used by several pivotal electoral battleground states, such as North Carolina and Virginia. The report attributed the scheme to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU. GRU’s plan, the NSA claimed, was to roll any success with VR Systems into a subsequent email attack against state voting officials across the country.

National: Sherrod Brown introduces bill to stop voter purges | The Columbus Dispatch

Sen. Sherrod Brown has reacted to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision supporting the Ohio secretary of state’s policy of purging inactive voters from the rolls with a bill aimed at stopping the practice. Brown, D-Ohio, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., announced Wednesday they are introducing a bill to amend the National Voter Registration Act to clarify that a state may not use someone’s failure to vote or respond to a state notice as a reason to remove them from active voter rolls. The bill is a direct reaction the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute case, in which the high court ruled that states may remove registered voters from rolls if they do not vote in multiple federal elections or if they don’t return a mailed address confirmation form. Brown is a former Ohio secretary of state, while Klobuchar is the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, which has oversight jurisdiction over federal elections.

Editorials: Jay Ashcroft claims voter fraud a bigger threat than hacking | The Kansas City Star

When Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft testified Wednesday in Washington about the security of America’s election systems, he made an astonishing and troubling statement. “The evidence indicates,” he said, “that voter fraud is an exponentially greater threat than hacking of election equipment.” What? Attempts to hack into America’s election systems are well-documented. The fact that they haven’t broadly succeeded, as far as we know, doesn’t mean they aren’t an imminent threat. “It’s disappointing to see this discredited fiction repeated by an election official,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center in New York. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, testifying at the same hearing, was clear. “Election security in general, and cybersecurity in particular, is the most significant threat to the integrity of our election system,” he said. He’s right.

California: Los Angeles County Selects IBM Security Services to Review Voter Roster Error | SCVNews

Los Angeles County has engaged information technology leader IBM Security Services to conduct an independent review and evaluation of the systems and procedures used in the production and printing of voter rosters for the June 5 Statewide Direct Primary Election. IBM will work with the county’s Chief Information Officer and Auditor-Controller to determine the root cause of the printing error and make recommendations for corrective action. “Our priority is ensuring a thorough and impartial review that is conducted to the highest professional standards,” said Chief Executive Officer Sachi A. Hamai. “Working with IBM Security Services, we are confident we will get the critical information needed to prevent this from happening again.”

Delaware: Delaware may award voting machine contract before releasing bid info | Delaware First Media

The Delaware Office of Management and Budget has requested $10 million for new state voting machines. But the state has not released any bid information on the vendors competing for the contract. OMB previously said it would keep the info private until it awarded the contract. Common Cause Delaware decried the lack in transparency and the Delaware Attorney General sided with them last month, saying OMB has to release the bid rankings.

Kansas: Kobach Finally Tells Clerks To Comply With Court Order On Proof-of-Citizenship | TPM

After two days of confusion — with some but not all county election officials enforcing a Kansas voting restriction struck down by a federal judge Monday — the Kansas Secretary of State’s office instructed local officials Wednesday that proof-of-citizenship was not required to register to vote. The instructions marked the end — or at least a pause — in a years-long saga of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach fighting tooth and nail to keep his signature voter restriction alive, despite multiple court rulings against it. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson issued her order Monday, after a seven-day trial in March, declaring the proof-of-citizenship requirement a violation of both the National Voter Registration Act as well as the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Maine: Technical glitch delays state RCV ballot count | The Ellsworth American

Go online and you can buy a USB memory stick, or thumb drive, for 10 bucks or less. Even a premium, high-speed 128-gigabyte device can be had for less than $50 and delivered to the door overnight. It appears, though, that a small, relatively inexpensive, device caused big problems for the Secretary of State’s Office. Last week, Maine voters went to the polls to select gubernatorial and other candidates in Democratic and Republican primary elections and to decide whether to continue ranked choice voting (RCV) in national elections and party primaries. As of Wednesday morning, Democrats were still waiting to find out who their candidate for governor would be come November and who would challenge Rep. Bruce Poliquin in the general election to represent Maine’s Second Congressional District.

On Tuesday, completion of the preliminary RCV tally that would answer those questions was delayed. Earlier in the day, technical problems forced Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap to send staff detectives to retrieve paper ballots from two Hancock County municipalities, Ellsworth and Orland, as well as from Gray, Lewiston and Westbrook. The reason was that digital images of some scanned ballots could not be read by the tabulation computers at the Secretary of State’s Office, so the original paper ballots had to be recovered and rescanned.

Nevada: Human error, tech problems cause of double voting in primary election | Las Vegas Review-Journal

Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said Wednesday that a combination of human error and technical problems allowed up to 43 voters to cast ballots twice in the primary election. During a County Commission meeting to certify election results, Gloria said he is unsure why some voters believed their first attempt to vote was unsuccessful. But he explained that volunteer poll workers during early voting and on Election Day did not confirm whether those voters’ ballots had been properly submitted before they were allowed to re-vote. “Had that been done, we probably would have avoided this whole situation,” he said, adding that it is his department’s responsibility to properly train poll workers.

North Carolina: Senate overrides Cooper vetoes of judicial district, election bills | Winston-Salem Chronicle

Republican legislators are moving to try to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes, this time on legislation redrawing judicial districts in some of North Carolina’s counties and election security. The North Carolina Senate on Tuesday, June 19, voted to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes of two bills – Senate Bill 486, which tightens election security measures to protect against the threat of outside influence, and Senate Bill 757, which makes changes to judicial districts in four counties. House Republicans would vote either Wednesday or today. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes of two bills adds more uncertainty to already unusual state elections this fall for judges and in races where new political parties want to field candidates. Cooper announced late Friday – less than three hours before a 10-day state constitutional deadline – his decision to block a pair of measures.

Congo: New Voting System Vulnerabilities in Congo | Joseph Lorenzo Hall/Center for Democracy & TechnologyCenter for Democracy & Technology

Reading headlines, it might surprise some that the United States is not the only country with serious voting technology challenges. In fact, recent years have seen issues in India, Africa, and Latin America; technical experts have examined some of those systems and found them lacking. Today, I’m pleased to report that The Sentry – an NGO that works to prevent genocide and mass atrocities in Africa – released a detailed analysis (full report PDF) of the new system slated for use in the upcoming elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Sentry worked with Argentinian security researchers Javier Smaldone (@mis2centavos) and Alfredo Ortega (@ortegaalfredo) and myself to examine what little public information is available about this system. The verdict is not good.

Iraq: Top court upholds election recount, reverses vote cancellations | Reuters

Iraq’s top court upheld on Thursday a law mandating a nationwide recount of votes in a May parliamentary election but ruled that the cancellation of overseas, displaced, and Peshmerga ballots was unconstitutional. Iraq, OPEC’s second largest oil producer, faces political uncertainty after the election, which was marred by a historically low turnout and allegations of fraud. Parliament, which had mandated the recount after a government report found serious violations had taken place, had also canceled some results such as overseas and displaced votes by amending the election law this month. The verdict from the Supreme Federal Court confirms the recount process, which was opposed by the elections commission and some parties who made significant gains in the election.

Moldova: Court Annuls Capital’s Election Result | Balkan Insight

Rival politicians in Moldova have expressed anger and confusion after a court on Tuesday ruled that the result of the June 3 elections for the mayor of the capital Chisinau was invalid. The court had not published the reason for the ruling by the time of publication. Electoral law in Moldova says election results may only be declared invalid if there is proof that they were tampered with by one or more candidates. Andrei Nastase, candidate for the Pro-European Dignity and Truth Platform, PPDA, won the second run-off election for the mayoralty on June 3, beating the candidate of the pro-Russian Socialist Party, Ion Ceban.

Turkey: Election watchdog removes key ballot security measure ahead of critical polls | Stockholm Center for Freedom

With four days to go until snap elections on June 24, Turkey’s Supreme Election Board (YSK) has decided to remove a requirement that ballots be stamped by polling station officials in order to be considered valid and counted, according to a report by the Cumhuriyet daily. The YSK wrote in a recent circular that envelopes required the official stamp to be considered valid except in cases where there was no stamp from polling station officials but that the YSK emblem, watermark and stamps from the district electoral board were visible. According to a report by online news outlet Ahval, Twitter user Mahir Durmaz explained that the ballot box officials’ stamps were key to the security of the vote.

Editorials: Erdoğan has Turkey in his palm as key elections loom | The Guardian

All along Istanbul’s boulevards, the face of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan looms large. For 16 years he has ruled over his country, victorious in election after election, vowing every time that Turkey is on the path to reclaiming its status as a great power in the Middle East and beyond. Turkey’s largest city is home to a variety of grandiose projects that channel this vision. In October, the government is scheduled to complete work on Istanbul’s third airport, which will serve 90 million passengers a year. A project to bypass the Bosphorus with new 28-mile (45km) waterway linking the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea – a project first proposed in the 16th century – will cost billions of dollars. Turkey is less than a week away from arguably its most important elections in modern history. The victor in the presidential race will assume an office with extraordinary powers, which were narrowly approved in a referendum last year, and rule until 2023 – the centennial of the republic’s founding from the ashes of the Ottoman empire.

National: Bill to help states secure election absent from defense spending package | StateScoop

The sponsors of a bill designed to help state election officials be briefed on threat information failed to insert any of their provisions in a defense spending package approved Monday by the U.S. Senate. Sens. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, and Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, had pushed to get parts of their bill, the Secure Elections Act, included in the National Defense Authorization Act. Brought on by concerns from the intelligence community that the Russian government will repeat its 2016 efforts to influence U.S. voters ahead of this November’s midterm elections, the Secure Elections Act was designed to make it easier for state elections officials to get the security clearances necessary to be briefed on threats. It would also direct the Department of Homeland Security to share threat information with state elections officials.

National: New Government Reports Shows Federal Agencies Facing Significant Cyber Security Risks | CPO Magazine

With all the talk about cyber security risks in the news, you would think that the U.S. federal government would be doing a better job of protecting its data from cyber attacks, including the very real threat of state-sponsored hackers. Yet, as a new Office of the Management and Budget (OMB) report points out, nearly 75 percent of federal agencies are still woefully unprepared to handle cyber security risks of any kind. This all comes on the heels of the United States government eliminating the position of federal cybersecurity czar earlier this year. While the report, which was prepared in collaboration of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), did not specifically call out which agencies were failing to respond to global cyber threats, it did suggest that the failures, gaps and inadequacies were relatively evenly distributed across the entire federal government. In fact, 71 of the 96 federal agencies reviewed were deemed to be “at risk” or “at high risk” of a cyber attack. The report defined “at risk” to mean that there were significant gaps in security preparedness, while “at high risk” means that fundamental processes were not even in place to deal with cyber security risks.

National: Senate defense bill pushes Trump to get tougher on Russian hacking | The Washington Post

The Senate wants to turn up the pressure on President Trump and his military chiefs to strike back against Russian hacking. The massive defense policy bill the Senate approved Monday night calls on Trump to curb Russian aggression in cyberspace. It gives Trump the green light to direct U.S. Cyber Command to “disrupt, defeat and deter” cyberattacks by the Russian government, conduct surveillance on Kremlin-backed hackers and partner with social media organizations to crack down on disinformation campaigns such as the ones that disrupted the 2016 election. It would also require the administration to send quarterly reports to Congress about the progress of its efforts.

Editorials: Less than Fundamental: The Myth of Voting Rights in America | David Schultz/International Policy Digest

There is a myth among election law experts that voting is a fundamental right in the United States. However, the Supreme Court’s recent Husted v. Philips Randolph Institute upholding Ohio’s voter purge law and Minnesota Voter Alliance v. Mansky striking down Minnesota’s political apparel ban are only the latest examples demonstrating that the right to vote in America is less than fundamental. These cases are part of the second great disenfranchisement in American politics. Like the first one after the end of Reconstruction, this one too aims to rig the election process, entrenching one set of interests in power. The story of voting rights in America is one of exceptionalism. In 1787 when the US Constitution was drafted the right to vote was absent from the text. The Constitution then (and still to this day because the Electoral College actually picks the president) did not a grant a right to vote for president. Senators were chosen by the state legislatures. While members of the House of Representatives could be selected by the people, who could vote was a matter of state law, franchise was generally limited to property-owning white males, at least 21 years old, who were citizens and members of a church or particular faith.

Editorials: The Best Way to Fix Gerrymandering Is to Make It Useless | Lee Drutman/The New York Times

In the months leading up to Monday’s Supreme Court punt on the gerrymandering cases out of Wisconsin and Maryland, those hoping the court would rein in partisan gerrymanders had been cautiously optimistic. Justice Anthony Kennedy made it known that if a “workable standard” could be found to distinguish legitimate districting from partisan gerrymandering, he might sign onto it. Reformers thought they had found that standard in something called the “efficiency gap.” But for now, with the court’s decision to not rule on the central questions the cases raise, we still lack a standard. The light is still green for state legislatures to draw maps as they please, and tempt their luck in the lower courts.

Florida: Counties sue to remove amendments from Florida’s November ballot | Tampa Bay Times

Two Florida counties are asking a court to throw an amendment off the November ballot that asks voters around the state to overrule decisions made by their local voters on which of their officials should be elected. In separate lawsuits filed this month in Leon County Circuit Court, Broward and Volusia counties are asking the court to invalidate Amendment 10, the proposal placed on the November ballot by the Republican-controlled Constitution Revision Commission. The two counties argue that the proposal unconstitutionally misleads voters because it fails to explain that if approved, voters in Broward and Volusia counties would be stripped of their right to govern themselves.

Editorials: Erecting early cyber-defenses key to protecting the vote | The Palm Beach Post

Thank goodness Palm Beach County elections officials haven’t waited for the state of Florida for help in hardening our voting system from cyberattacks. First, the Legislature failed to approve money for a cyber-security unit in the state elections office, so Gov. Rick Scott is resorting to a federal grant to contract for five consultants to assist elections officials. Then the Scott administration let months go by without bothering to seek $19.2 million in federal money for cyber security that’s been available since President Trump signed the most recent spending bill, in March.

Kansas: How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed | ProPublica

In the end, the decision seemed inevitable. After a seven-day trial in Kansas City federal court in March, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach needed to be tutored on basic trial procedure by the judge and was found in contempt for his “willful failure” to obey a ruling, even he knew his chances were slim. Kobach told The Kansas City Star at the time that he expected the judge would rule against him (though he expressed optimism in his chances on appeal). Sure enough, yesterday federal Judge Julie Robinson overturned the law that Kobach was defending as lead counsel for the state, dealing him an unalloyed defeat. The statute, championed by Kobach and signed into law in 2013, required Kansans to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, contending that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act (AKA the “motor voter” law), which was designed to make it easy to register.

Maine: Ranked-choice ballot count delayed due to memory stick issue | WGME

There’s been a delay in the tabulation of the ranked-choice ballots, as Democrats wait for a gubernatorial candidate to be announced. It was looking like the ranked-choice results would be in Tuesday, when a problem was discovered with a few voting memory sticks not loading into the computer. Secretary of State Matt Dunlap says those memory sticks worked on election night, but now they won’t download.

Nevada: Officials still probing glitches with voting machines | Reno Gazette Journal

Nearly a week after Nevada’s primary election, officials are yet to look under the hood to see what caused glitches with Washoe County’s new voting machines. County Registrar of Voters Deanna Spikula said her office was still working to finalize and audit results from last week’s primary election and had not had a chance to conduct a full assessment of what went wrong with the county’s recently unveiled, multimillion-dollar election hardware. Officials last week said they were aware of fewer than 10 voters affected by well-publicized malfunctions that left some candidates off of ballots or displayed the wrong slate of ballot choices — potentially giving voters a chance to help decide races they weren’t eligible to vote in.

Nevada: 43 double votes may prompt redo of Clark County election | Las Vegas Review-Journal

Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria is calling for a redo of a primary election decided by a razor-thin margin because 43 voters may have cast ballots twice as a result of an “unacceptable” failure in procedure by poll workers. Aaron Manfredi won the Republican primary for county administrator on June 12 by only four votes. A total of 59,032 votes were cast in that race. “Because the number of discrepancies is higher than the difference in the candidates’ totals, (the registrar) is unable to certify the results of this race and is calling for a special election to resolve the contest,” county spokesman Dan Kulin wrote in a statement.

North Carolina: Judge rules for lawmakers: No primary elections for judges | News & Observer

In the first year in decades that all judicial races will be partisan races, North Carolina will not have primary elections that allow the political parties to winnow the names of candidates who will appear on ballots this fall. U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles notified attorneys for the Democratic Party and North Carolina lawmakers on Tuesday that she plans to rule for the legislators in a lawsuit filed late last year. The North Carolina Democratic Party contended that abolishing primary elections for judicial races violated its right to assemble and choose a candidate of its choice to appear on the ballot.

Wisconsin: Democrats seek to bring case back to Supreme Court before 2020 elections | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin Republicans are claiming victory with Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to send a lawsuit over the state’s legislative boundaries back to a lower court without addressing whether the map is constitutionally drawn. But Democrats say the ruling doesn’t put the legal fight to bed as Republicans suggest, and vow to clear any hurdle to get the nation’s highest court to answer the question of whether Wisconsin’s districts are so partisan that they violate the Constitution before the next round of map drawing.

Mexico: Russian bots are accused of meddling in Mexico’s election | Business Insider

Shortly after Mexican presidential candidate Ricardo Anaya held up a placard announcing his campaign’s newest website, Debate2018.mx, during a debate on June 12, the site was overwhelmed by an influx of traffic. Anaya’s campaign said the site — which was to offer evidence of wrongdoing by campaign frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — likely experienced a distributed denial of service attack and that most of the traffic had come from Russia and China. But experts have cast doubt on that version of events and said homegrown cyber activity will likely play a bigger role in Mexico’s election.