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As details emerge about the tech issues that have delayed the results of the Iowa caucus and thrown the public into states of confusion and frustration, I marvel at the familiarity of the story to anyone who has spent long enough working on the front lines of enterprise technology. It should be noted that the dust is still settling on events in the Hawkeye State, and so it may be a few more days until we know with absolute certainty what transpired and how exactly, in 2020, the results of the caucus are taking longer to arrive than in pre-internet days. But reports so far focus on the haphazard roll-out of a new voting app designed to facilitate (ostensibly) the transmission of results from caucus locations to centralized election monitors. A number of problems appear to have occurred with this process – ranging from caucus-site volunteers being unable to log-in to report results to rumored compromising by outside parties to scramble the results-logging process. Whatever the final assessment, it’s certainly not too early to call this a disaster, with a bungled roll-out as catalyst.

Minnesota: Democrats seek to free up election security funds | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

Minnesota House Democrats launched an attempt Thursday to prevent Republicans from blocking Secretary of State Steve Simon from spending $7.4 million in federal election security money, aiming to head off a repeat of partisan maneuvering from last year. Rep. Mike Freiberg, of Golden Valley, told a state government finance committee that Minnesota is one of only a handful of states that require the Legislature to sign off before elections officials can use federal money provided under the Help America Vote Act. His bill would eliminate the need for legislative approval. The latest round of federal funding was assigned in December. The federal government allocated Minnesota $6.6 million in the previous round in 2018 after Minnesota and other states’ election systems were targeted by foreign hackers in 2016. The Democratic-controlled House authorized spending it by a wide bipartisan margin last year.

Nevada: Volunteers and campaigns worry about results reporting ahead of Nevada caucuses | Holmes Lybrand, Dianne Gallagher, Pamela Kirkland and Dan Merica/CNN

With the Nevada Democratic caucuses only a week away, both caucus workers and presidential campaigns are worried about the lack of detail the state party is providing about how the results reporting process will work. The worries come after the state party stopped working with Shadow Inc., the company behind the app whose “coding errors” were at the heart of the chaos of the Iowa caucuses. Having scrapped plans to use a pair of Shadow’s apps, the parties will instead use a “caucus calculator,” as outlined in a new memo released by the Nevada State Democratic Party Thursday. Described as “user friendly,” the calculator will be used to add early voting data into each precinct and calculate totals on caucus day, February 22, along with paper work sheets. The tool, which the party does not consider an app, will be available on iPads owned by the party and “accessed through a secure Google web form.” A similar memo was sent to the presidential campaigns on Monday.

West Virginia: State Expands Online Voting as Security Worries Grow | Patrick Groves/Government Technology

West Virginia, which has become an early tester of blockchain voting, is expanding Internet voting to include those with physical disabilities. But the move comes just as researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have published a paper asserting that Voatz — the app West Virginia has been using in its pilot tests — has serious flaws, including the ability of bad actors to change votes without voters’ knowledge. Gov. Jim Justice signed SB 94 into law last week giving the secretary of state permission to create a system that allows people with physical disabilities to vote electronically. The Office of the Secretary of State lauded its success with Boston-based vendor Voatz that tallied 144 ballots from uniformed and overseas citizens in 2018. The Secretary of State’s Office may choose the startup again to enact the new law’s mandate for the 2020 primary and general elections. But election security experts and computer scientists have grown increasingly skeptical of the cybersecurity surrounding voting apps, especially after a mobile app used during the Iowa Caucus recorded data accurately but only reported it partially due to a coding error.

National: Voting on Your Phone: New Elections App Ignites Security Debate | Matthew Rosenberg/The New York Times

For more than a decade, it has been an elusive dream for election officials: a smartphone app that would let swaths of voters cast their ballots from their living rooms. It has also been a nightmare for cyberexperts, who argue that no technology is secure enough to trust with the very basis of American democracy. The debate, long a sideshow at academic conferences and state election offices, is now taking on new urgency. A start-up called Voatz says it has developed an app that would allow users to vote securely from anywhere in the world — the electoral version of a moonshot. Thousands are set to use the app in this year’s elections, a small but growing experiment that could pave the way for a wider acceptance of mobile voting. But where optimists see a more engaged electorate, critics are warning that the move is dangerously irresponsible. In a new report shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication on Thursday, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say the app is so riddled with security issues that no one should be using it.

National: MIT researchers identify security vulnerabilities in voting app | Abby Abazorius/MIT News

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using internet and mobile technology to increase access to the voting process. At the same time, computer security experts caution that paper ballots are the only secure means of voting. Now, MIT researchers are raising another concern: They say they have uncovered security vulnerabilities in a mobile voting application that was used during the 2018 midterm elections in West Virginia. Their security analysis of the application, called Voatz, pinpoints a number of weaknesses, including the opportunity for hackers to alter, stop, or expose how an individual user has voted. Additionally, the researchers found that Voatz’s use of a third-party vendor for voter identification and verification poses potential privacy issues for users.

National: CISA and states tell Senate more cybersecurity resources needed | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

State IT officials and the federal government’s top civilian cybersecurity official told members of the U.S. Senate Tuesday that the federal government needs to provide state and local governments with more assistance and expertise in protecting their networks and other critical infrastructure. Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; Michigan Chief Security Officer Chris DeRusha; and Amanda Crawford, executive director of the Texas Department of Information Resources, each told members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee that while collaboration on cybersecurity between states and the federal government has improved in recent years, funding and resources for those activities are still in short supply. Krebs acknowledged his agency was not built to support state and local governments when it became the Department of Homeland Security’s newest branch in late 2018. But with ongoing threats to election security and a spike in ransomware attacks against local governments, he said, “we have had to build out our support to states.”

National: How Can State and Local Agencies Better Collaborate on Cybersecurity? | Phil Goldstein/StateTech Magazine

Some state governments, such as Massachusetts, have established formal plans to work with localities within their states on cybersecurity. However, as ransomware attacks proliferate across the country and strike big cities and small towns alike, state-level organizations say there needs to be greater IT security coordination between states and municipalities. Last month, the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers released a report, “Stronger Together: State and Local Cybersecurity Collaboration,” designed to showcase best practices for such collaboration. “State governments are increasingly providing services to county and municipal governments, including endpoint protection, shared service agreements for cyber defensive tools, incident response and statewide cybersecurity awareness and training,” the report notes. At a minimum, the report says, increased engagement can provide government agencies with “a more accurate threat picture to enhance state and local governments’ cyber posture.” Yet agencies need to move beyond mere information sharing to “leverage limited resources for enhanced cyber capabilities,” the report notes.

National: Russia will try to meddle in 2020 U.S. election, intelligence report says | Courtney Kube/NBC

Russia interfered in Western elections in 2019 and is likely to do so again in 2020, according to the latest annual threat assessment by the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service. NBC News obtained an exclusive preview of the annual report from the Baltic nation’s intelligence agency, which warns that Russia will continue to pursue cyber operations that threaten other nations. “Russia’s cyber operations have been successful and, to date, have not been sanctioned enough by the West to force Russia to abandon them,” the report says. Russia will try to interfere in the U.S. presidential election in November and in parliamentary elections in the nation of Georgia in October, it warns, saying, “The main goal is to ensure a more beneficial election result for Russia by favoring Russian-friendly candidates or those who have the most divisive influence in the West.”

Florida: Palm Beach County elections office hit by ransomware before 2016 election | Hannah Morse/The Palm Beach Post

Current Palm Beach County elections supervisor Wendy Sartory Link said she recently learned about a 2016 ransomware attack at the elections office. Weeks before the 2016 election that would usher in Donald Trump as president, the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office was subject to a ransomware attack, elections supervisor Wendy Sartory Link told The Palm Beach Post on Wednesday. The attack more than three years ago happened while Susan Bucher was elections supervisor, but Link said she was unsure how the virus infiltrated the system. “We weren’t part of that, but have we been hacked in Palm Beach County? Yeah, we have,” Link said during an editorial board interview. But Link said she does not believe the ransomware attack against the county is one of the two Russian hacking attempts in Florida revealed in former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report last April.

Kansas: Senate panel considers bill requiring paper ballots in Kansas elections | Sydney Hoover/The Topeka Capital-Journal

The Senate Ethics, Elections and Local Government committee heard testimony Wednesday on a bill that would require all Kansas counties to use paper ballots to count votes. Ballots would have several requirements, including the voter’s signature. Votes would be counted by hand or using vote-tabulating equipment that would tally the paper ballot. “At one time, everything was paper ballots, but now Kansas currently has a mix,” said Sen. Richard Hildebrand, R-Baxter Springs. “Once you cast your ballot, you are up to whatever the machine says you voted without the verification from the voter.” Hildebrand said the bill would eliminate the chance of issues such as those during the Iowa caucuses, where a faulty mobile application failed to transmit votes and caused a delay in results.

Louisiana: How Louisiana ended up this year’s election security outlier | David Hawkings/The Fulcrum

The moment of truth for voting system reliability remains nearly nine months off, but already Louisiana has earned itself a troublesome and unique footnote in the story of the 2020 presidential election. It will surely be the only state running totally afoul of the new world of balloting best practices, which says creating and keeping a paper record is the only way to assure every vote is counted accurately (and recounted if need be) and properly reflects the will of the voter. There won’t be a single sheet of paper involved in tabulating the results in Louisiana on Election Day — unlike any of the other 49 states, according to a comprehensive study by Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that promotes the integrity of elections. All 3,934 polling places will use entirely electronic voting machines that are at least 15 years old, and which do not generate printouts of anything as a fail-safe if something goes wrong.

Tennessee: Ballot Bombshell: Election Machine Issue In Shelby County Becomes Moot | Jackson Baker/Memphis News and Events | Memphis Flyer

Some drama was expected, but nothing like the more-than-audible gasp that exuded from the audience at Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission, when Tami Sawyer articulated what was suddenly and shockingly becoming obvious: “There will be no new machines in 2020,” said Sawyer, summarizing it all in an epiphany after an hour or so of intense debate and argument on both sides of the speakers’ dock regarding what sort of new voting machines the county should get in its long-planned buy in time for the August election cycle locally. County Election Coordinator Linda Phillips had been making and repeating that promise of new machines for most of the last year, kindling up an ever-growing local controversy as to which type of machine. On Sunday she had published a viewpoint in The Commercial Appeal in which the following two sentences were the key ones: “Now that we are about to replace our outdated voting equipment, the controversy has reached the boiling point. I have spent my career conducting elections, and I’d like to share my viewpoint.”

Utah: Lawmaker says Iowa caucuses a cautionary tale for online voting | Art Raymond/Deseret News

Issues in the recent Iowa Democratic caucuses with a smartphone app are a further reminder, according to one Utah lawmaker, that the state should move slowly and deliberately toward any future change to a statewide online voting system.

To that end, Rep. Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, is sponsoring a proposal to spend some 20 months on a study to determine what, if any, digital voting system is secure enough to trust with running Utah elections. That proposal, HB292, got unanimous support from the House Government Operations Committee on Wednesday and is now headed to the full body for further consideration. Ahead of the meeting, McKell told the Deseret News the proposed study isn’t due until October 2021 and would have no impact on the upcoming general election, nor the 2021 off-year municipal elections. The goal of the study, McKell said, is to take the necessary time to do a thorough assessment of the potential advantages, and pitfalls, of moving the voting process into the digital realm. “I think we need to slow things down and commit to a thorough review of internet voting,” McKell said. “I think there are a lot of pressures in play to use new technologies and take advantage of efficiencies they can bring. “But we just saw a whole host of problems in Iowa … that are a reminder that we’re just not there yet.”

Wisconsin: Cities Still Recovering From January Cyberattacks | Miranda Suarez/Wisconsin Public Radio

Two Wisconsin cities are still recovering after they were hit with ransomware in January, and one state official predicts those kinds of attacks will only get worse in the future. Ransomware is a kind of cyberattack that locks governments or companies out of their data, usually demanding money in exchange for access. It often enters a system through phishing emails, which contain a shady link or attachment. Ransomware shut down internal computer systems, like email, in Oshkosh and Racine on Jan. 28 and Jan. 31, respectively. Oshkosh city spokesperson Emily Springstroh said the city is mostly back online, but they don’t know yet how the virus got in.

Bulgaria: Government will buy voting machines for all polling stations | The Sofia Globe

The Bulgarian government will provide funds to buy voting machines so that there is one at each polling station at the next elections, Prime Minister Boiko Borissov told a Cabinet meeting on February 12. He added, however, that he was not convinced that this would solve anything. In 2019, Bulgaria’s Parliament amended the Electoral Code to require the use of 3000 voting machines in last year’s presidential elections, 6000 in the municipal elections, and in National Assembly elections. Ahead of the autumn 2019 municipal elections, the law was amended again, to remove the requirement for the use of machines in that vote. That followed a Central Electoral Commission (CEC) analysis after the European Parliament elections that the deployment of voting machines – the first time they had been used on a large scale in Bulgaria – had created a number of difficulties.

Iran: U.S. must increase defenses against Iranian information operations, report says | Sean Lyngaas/CyberScoop

As social media platforms battle Iranian bots and trolls, the U.S. government needs to step up its own fight against Tehran’s digital influence operations, a new study says. With the 2020 election approaching, Washington should do more to attribute Iranian and other foreign influence operations and warn the public about them, scholars at the Atlantic Council think tank argue. “Iran has invested significant resources and accumulated vast experience in the conduct of digital influence efforts,” the report says. It calls on the Department of Homeland Security to create an intergovernmental agency to alert U.S. officials and the public of foreign influence operations. U.S. intelligence agencies need to work closely with social media companies to pinpoint foreign influence operations, Atlantic Council scholars Emerson Brooking and Suzanne Kianpour’s advise. That collaboration is a work in progress.

Taiwan: Taiwan’s Electoral System Puts the US to Shame | Dominique Reichenbach/The Diplomat

The looming 2020 U.S. presidential election will no doubt spark debate about the electoral college yet again, and the delayed and contested results from the Iowa caucus, the first test in the Democratic primary process, have already brought outrage. With that background in mind, the United States could learn a valuable lesson about improving democratic participation and voting processes from Taiwan. At 4:30 p.m. on January 11, 2020, a polling station in a first-floor classroom of Longan Elementary School in Da’an District of Taipei transformed into a paragon of democracy and civic engagement. An audience of 15 Taiwanese adults and children watched quietly as a man, on stage right in the theater of democracy, reached into a ballot box, pulled out a messy stack of pink papers and passed them one by one to a female announcer. The announcer held the first ballot high above her head and called “Number 3 Tsai Ing-wen Ticket” in a strikingly clear voice, breaking the silence of the room. A woman behind her etched a tally in Tsai’s column on the official tracking sheet, marking the beginning of the election count.

National: Senate GOP blocks three election security bills | Jordan Carney/The Hill

Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to unanimously pass three election security-related bills Tuesday, marking the latest attempt to clear legislation ahead of the November elections. Democrats tried to get consent to pass two bills that require campaigns to alert the FBI and Federal Election Commission (FEC) about foreign offers of assistance, as well as legislation to provide more election funding and ban voting machines from being connected to the internet. But Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) opposed each of the requests. Under the Senate’s rules, any one senator can ask for unanimous consent to pass a bill, but any one senator can object and block their requests. Blackburn accused Democrats of trying to move the bills knowing that GOP lawmakers would block them and giving them fodder for fundraising efforts. “They are attempting to bypass this body’s Rules Committee on behalf of various bills that will seize control over elections from the states and take it from the states and where do they want to put it? They want it to rest in the hands of Washington, D.C., bureaucrats,” she said.

National: After GAO critique, DHS releases 2020 election security plan | Dean DeChiaro/Roll Call

The government’s top cybersecurity agency will focus on four key objectives to secure this year’s elections from hacking and other interference: protecting election infrastructure, assisting political campaigns, increasing public awareness about foreign intrusion, and facilitating the flow of information on vulnerabilities and potential threats between the public and private sectors. That’s according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s #Protect2020 Strategic Plan, issued by the Homeland Security Department on Friday. The blueprint follows a Government Accountability Office report that said the agency would struggle to execute a nationwide strategy without a finalized agenda. The strategic plan describes the agency’s plans to work with federal law enforcement and state and local election officials on a “whole-of-nation effort” to defend electoral systems. “If we learned anything through 2016 and the Russian interference with our elections, it’s [that] no single organization, no single state, no locality can go at this problem alone,” CISA Director Christopher Krebs said in the report.

National: White House Budget Gives Election Assistance Commission More Funding, But Expert Says It’s Not Enough | Courtney Bublé/Government Executive

Amid growing concern about the integrity of the nation’s election systems, President Trump gave the federal agency charged with coordinating efforts to ensure accurate and secure voting a slight funding increase as part of his fiscal 2021 budget request to Congress, but one expert says it would not be nearly enough. On Monday, the White House sent Congress a $4.8 trillion budget request for fiscal 2021 that would increase military spending by 0.3% and decrease non-defense spending by 5%. For the bipartisan and independent Election Assistance Commission, the plan proposed allocating a little over $13 million, of which $1.5 million would be transferred to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This would represent a $300,000 increase over fiscal 2020 enacted levels, after subtracting a one-time allocation for relocation expenses from the 2020 total. While some election security experts applauded the slight funding boost in Trump’s proposal, others say more is needed for the agency that certifies voting systems and serves as an information clearinghouse for best practices in election administration.

National: As Targets, States Need to Be Prepared for the 2020 Election | Tom Guarente/StateTech Magazine

With the first 2020 election primaries upon us, state government leaders are faced with the critical question of whether their election systems are prepared for looming cybersecurity threats. Foreign threat actors have shown again and again their interest in undermining one of the most sacred rights Americans hold: the vote. In Florida, it’s been reported, Russian interference in voter roll systems had the potential to alter results during the 2016 midterm elections. In Illinois, media reports show, there’s evidence that hackers working for Russian military intelligence installed malware on the network of a voter registration technology vendor. In fact, all 50 states’ election systems were targeted by Russia in 2016, according to a July 2019 report from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Cyber-enabled election threats did not end in 2016. In the 2018 midterm elections, FireEye identified multiple social media accounts impersonating congressional candidates and spreading pro-Iran messages.

National: Iowa’s app fiasco worries mobile voting advocates | Tonya Riley/The Washington Post

The fiasco caused by an app that failed to properly transmit votes in the Iowa caucuses is worrying the mobile voting industry, which hoped 2020 would be a banner year. Companies — and proponents of incorporating more technology into elections — are trying to avoid being lumped in with the hastily made app used in Iowa. They’re saying its failure proves serious investment in user-friendly, secure election technology is more critical than ever. “We need to ensure that every new idea is tested, transparent and secure — just like the eight successful mobile voting pilots conducted to date,” Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Philanthropies, said in a statement. “Enough is enough. 2016 should have been enough of a wake-up call. Iowa just confirmed it.” Tusk Philanthropies has funded pilots for mobile voting across the country, launched in a push to increase participation in elections. Unlike the app used in Iowa, which was developed to relay vote counts, the pilots use technologies that allow voters to easily vote from their mobile phones. So far, the pilots have largely been limited to eligible uniformed and overseas voters and voters with disabilities. But any expansion is sure to fall under an even more critical spotlight. Any malfunction — or hack — of an app used directly for voting in 2020 could have far greater impact in undermining public faith in the Democratic process than one Democratic caucus gone wrong.

Editorials: Americans Were Already Primed To Distrust Elections. Then Came Iowa. | Maggie Koerth/FiveThirtyEight

When the Iowa caucuses went to hell in a handbasket last week, they probably took some of Americans’ last morsels of trust in the political system down too. But when I asked political scientists and psychologists about the impact of the bungled caucuses on overall political cynicism, they, by and large, weren’t particularly concerned. The vast majority of voters probably won’t care all that much, they said; instead, these experts are more worried about the indirect effects. Long after the shoddy apps have been forgotten, mistrust and bitterness could still be trickling down from political elites to everyone else. We’re already primed to think something’s wrong with our voting system. Even before the caucuses, more than 40 percent of Americans felt the country wasn’t prepared to keep the November elections secure, and 45 percent thought it was likely that not all votes were going to be counted. Partisans of a losing candidate are less likely to believe their vote was counted correctly, while winners get a boost in electoral confidence that can last for months.

Editorials: Foreign interference in elections is unacceptable. Congress must make it illegal. | Jeffrey H. Smith and John B. Bellinger III/The Washington Post

The Senate, by a nearly straight party-line vote, has now acquitted President Trump of the charges in the articles of impeachment brought by the House. The president had insisted that his dealings with Ukraine over military aid and a possible investigation of Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president Joe Biden, were “perfect.” However, even as Republican senators acquitted him, several disagreed, saying his actions were wrong but did not break any law. In response, the House impeachment managers argued that the constitutional grounds “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” for impeachment did not require violation of a specific federal criminal statute. Whether one views the president’s actions as justifying removal from office or not, we believe that the prospect of foreign interference in U.S. elections is today so grave — whether initiated by a foreign power or invited by a candidate — that Congress must make such activity illegal. Doing so would be consistent with history. For example, after the Vietnam War and President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation over Watergate, Congress enacted a series of laws to rein in executive power. These included the establishment of intelligence oversight committees in Congress, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the War Powers Resolution, and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (which the Government Accountability Office concluded Trump had violated).

Editorials: Proposed Georgia vote recount rule baffles | Savannah Morning News

Voting integrity is worth $120 million to Georgia taxpayers but seemingly much less to state election officials. Georgians just made a huge investment in our elections with the purchase and implementation of a new election system. The most valuable improvement, without question, is the ability to verify results by hand recount using printed ballot backups. The State Election Board is threatening to turn the entire overhaul into a nine-figure waste of money. Chaired by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, himself a supposed champion of the “physical recount,” the State Election Board is considering a rule that would leave the counting to the computer. In the event of a recount, the backup ballots would be run through the counting machine a second time rather than be physically reviewed and counted by local election officials. The move is preposterous on several levels. Let’s focus on the most obvious. Coming off a 2018 midterm election where voting integrity was the dominant theme, Raffensperger and company are stoking the simmering doubts of the electorate. To call this proposed rule tone deaf is to insult all those who can’t carry a tune.

Iowa: How Acronym Pitched Itself to Potential Investors: “We Don’t Do Hyperbole. We Call BS.” | Ali Breland/Mother Jones

The letter was sent to prospective investors not long ago, the prose so redolent of disruptomatic DC consultant patter that lanyards practically hang from every word. “We don’t do hyperbole,” it reads. “We call BS. We say when our programs work. We say when they don’t because being dishonest or evasive tells us you have something to hide.” It goes on a little later: “Just don’t measure our success by how many Politico articles we’re mentioned in. You’ll be disappointed.” The letter, obtained by Mother Jones, was likely sent in 2018 on behalf of a nonprofit called Acronym, which today is infamous for having launched the tech company that launched the app that launched the Iowa Democratic caucuses into a days-long spectacle of incompetence. In the days since the caucuses went sideways in part because of its undertested app, Acronym has been evasive, if not dishonest. It has been mentioned in at least a dozen Politico articles, and indeed no one has taken the media attention as a measure of Acronym’s success.

Louisiana: Hacks on Louisiana Parishes Hint at Nightmare Election Scenario | Kartikay Mehrotra/Bloomberg

James Wroten called the clerk of court in Vernon Parish, Louisiana last November with an urgent message. The timing wasn’t convenient. The clerk, Jeffrey Skidmore, was relaxing on his back porch and hoping to soak in some final moments of quiet before state and local elections. Skidmore let the call go to voicemail. But Wroten, whose company manages IT services for small companies and local governments, persisted until Skidmore finally picked up. “He told me we’d been infected by ransomware and to ask all 14 of my employees not to go into the office or try to access any of their files,” said Skidmore. “I was stunned. We had an election in six days.” That call, Wroten later recalled, was the start of one of the worst weeks of his life. Hackers had infiltrated Wroten’s company, Need Computer Help. From there, the attackers used the connections Wroten’s employees need to do their job in order to breach the networks of Vernon Parish and six other local parishes, the Louisiana equivalent of counties. The attacks highlight how vulnerable local jurisdictions remain despite four years of efforts to shore up defenses in preparation for the 2020 presidential election.

Maryland: Board of Elections halts wireless networks after glitch | Steve Thompson /The Washington Post

Maryland election officials have removed a requirement that some counties use an expanded wireless network during this year’s elections, after the network caused slowdowns during the special primary election last week. Opponents of the cellular networking system are pointing to delays during the special election in Maryland’s 7th congressional district as vindication of their concerns about cost and security risks. The primary was a day after technical problems threw Iowa’s Democratic caucus results under a cloud of uncertainty. State Sen. Cheryl C. Kagan (D-Montgomery) says the networking equipment is costly, unnecessary and vulnerable to hackers. She is sponsoring emergency legislation to ease deadlines under which local officials must tally votes, a move intended to remove the justification given by state election officials for using the new network. “If these wireless devices malfunctioned when only 60,000 voters came out for a special election, how can you rely on them when we’re expecting roughly one and a half million voters on primary election day?” Kagan said this week.

New Hampshire: Windsor’s Oak Voting Machine Still Works After Only 130 Years (Eat Your Heart Out Iowa) | Paula Tracy/InDepthNH