Georgia: Hand recounts of Georgia’s paper ballots barred by election proposal | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has repeatedly said paper ballots will give Georgia voters “a physical recount.” But under a proposed elections rule, the only physical part of the recount would occur when poll workers feed ballots into the machines. The rule calls for recounts to be conducted by ballot scanning machines that read votes encoded in bar codes. Election officials won’t review the ballot text to check the accuracy of vote totals until the state develops auditing rules. Election integrity organizations say recounts of paper ballots should be done by hand to help ensure that the printed text matches votes tabulated from the bar code. “You have to have a manual process to confirm a computerized process,” said Marian K. Schneider, the president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization that promotes accurate and verifiable elections. “The best way is to do a hand recount that can look at the human-readable text on the paper output.”

National: Election officials get training before 2020 voting begins | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

When state election officials gathered ahead of the last presidential election, major topics were voter registration, identity theft and ballot design. This year, the main theme is election security. The change since 2016 underscores how election security has become a top concern with presidential nominating contests set to begin next week. Kicking off Thursday’s meeting was a training exercise coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security. Election officials from 44 states joined officials with 11 federal agencies and representatives from more than a dozen voting technology companies to participate in the half-day exercise to help them keep votes secure. “We’ve come a long ways,” said Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate. “That’s the strength of doing these tabletops: putting everyone in the same room so we have that contact and preparing for whatever scenarios might come up.” The vast majority of panels at the biannual meetings of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors are dedicated to cybersecurity, from what states can do to disrupt hacking attempts to the threat of ransomware.

National: House GOP introduces bill to secure voter registration systems against foreign hacking | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Republicans on the House Administration Committee on Wednesday introduced legislation that would seek to update a long-standing federal election law and secure voter registration databases from foreign hacking attempts. The Protect American Voters Act (PAVA) would require the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to establish the Emerging Election Technology Committee (EETC), which would help create voluntary guidelines for election equipment, such as voter registration databases, not covered under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). HAVA was signed into law in 2002 following problems with voting during the 2000 presidential election. The law established the EAC and set minimum election administration standards.  The EETC would be empowered to bypass the existing Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines process, which is a voluntary set of voting requirements that voting systems can be tested against to ensure their security and accessibility. The new bill would also establish an Election Cyber Assistance Unit within the EAC, which would help connect state and local election officials across the country with cybersecurity experts who could provide technical support. 

National: Securing elections starts with securing voter registration | Samuel S. Visner/StateScoop

It’s Nov. 3, Election Day: You go to the polls at the school where you’ve cast your ballots for the last 15 years, only to be told you are no longer on the voter registration list. And according to your state’s online database, you’re now supposed to be voting at a church 15 miles away. You’re confused, angry and late for work. So, you don’t vote. And your candidates of choice lose. How would you feel about those who won, much less the democratic process, after that? Attacking voter registration databases is one of the many ways threat actors could attempt to tamper with this year’s presidential election. After the 2016 election cycle, U.S. intelligence officials concluded that hostile nation-state actors attempted to access voter files in all 50 states and succeeded in some states, including Illinois. These and other kinds of compromises, such as ransomware that could deny election officials’ access to critical voter data during the 2020 election, could undermine confidence in U.S. institutions and the perceived legitimacy of those elected.

National: There’s a new cross-country effort to train election and campaign pros on digital security | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

A team from the University of Southern California has embarked on a 50-state tour to give cybersecurity training to poll workers and state and local campaign staffers who will be the last line of defense against Russian hacking in 2020. The group, called the Election Cybersecurity Initiative, views itself as a bottom-up, grass-roots counterpart to national-level election security efforts led by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of Russia’s election interference in 2016. It’s hoping to advise local election officials, Election Day volunteers, ground-level campaign door-knockers and even interns in both political parties who national officials are unlikely to reach. The group also wants to build a network of cybersecurity experts at universities across the nation who can help secure local races and polling sites. “There are incredible grass-roots resources and folks who are highly educated,” Justin Griffin, the group’s managing director, told me. “We’re really going to the states to touch those folks who could never take the time or have the budget to come to Washington for a session like this.” The cross-country effort, which launched in Maryland this week, is yet another example of how the threat of hacking and disinformation is affecting every part of the elections and campaign process. The group, which is funded with a grant from Google, is modeling itself after an election campaign and using the tagline: “Our candidate is democracy.”

California: Long Beach’s District 1 special election at the center of lawsuit over Los Angeles County’s new voting systems | Hayley Munguia /Press Telegram

Long Beach’s most recent election is at the center of a lawsuit against Los Angeles County over new voting machines that will go into widespread use during the March 3 elections. Beverly Hills filed a complaint last week against the county, arguing the new voting technology — known as Voting Solutions for All People 2.0 — could impact the results of an election with more than four candidates. The new machines have been in the works for more than a decade and are intended to make voting more accessible. They can display the ballot in 13 languages, and voters who are visually impaired can use an audio headset. But the lawsuit centers on a different aspect of the design: The “more” button that voters must press to see beyond the first screen of candidates, which only includes four names. Voters do not need to scroll through the entire list of candidates before selecting one. The Beverly Hills lawsuit, filed Wednesday, Jan. 22, argues that people may simply pick one of the first four names they see and move on without pressing the “more” button to reveal the rest of the candidates. That city’s evidence? The special election Long Beach held in November to pick District 1’s next representative on the City Council.

Illinois: Elections officials disclose fresh problems with voter registration | Sophia Tareen/Associated Press

Illinois elections officials disclosed fresh problems Wednesday with the state’s automatic voter registration program, including at least one eligible voter who said she registered to vote but ended up on an opt-out list. The program is already under fire for mistakenly registering over 500 people who indicated they weren’t U.S. citizens, of which 15 people voted in 2018 and 2019 elections. Election officials said at least eight of the people have long voting histories and were likely U.S. citizens, leaving seven voters in question. The individuals involved were applying for standard drivers’ licenses at secretary of state’s offices. Details were scarce on the new issues, disclosed at a State Board of Elections meeting. Brenda Glahn, an attorney with the secretary of state, said registrations of eligible voters who appeared to decline to be registered were still sent to election officials. The problems stem from those applying for a REAL ID, which requires proof of citizenship.

Illinois: From arrows to ovals and ‘giant iPads,’ voters in Chicago and Cook County will see new voting machines at the polls | Dan Petrella/Chicago Tribune

Voters in Chicago and the rest of Cook County will see brand-new voting machines when they head to the polls for the March 17 primary elections. All Chicago polling places will be equipped with new voting machines for paper ballots and each will have at least one new touch-screen voting machine, Chicago Board of Election spokesman James Allen said Monday. The most noticeable change will be that voters will fill in an oval rather than connecting to sides of an arrow when filling out a paper ballot, Allen said. The new touch-screen voting machines, which will resemble “giant iPads,” will print out a paper ballot, which voters will then feed into a scanner, much like they do with handwritten ballots. The city elections board is spending $21 million on the machines, with nearly $19 million coming from the city. The City Council approved a measure Jan. 15 that moves $18.7 million from city’s streetlight replacement program to pay for the new equipment. The city and the local election authority are paying for the new equipment because “everybody’s grown weary of waiting” for new federal funding for election equipment, Allen said. “Numerous jurisdictions around the state are just turning to their local pocketbooks,” he said. Fifty-five early voting sites across the city open March 2 and will all be equipped with the new touch-screen machines, Allen said.

Ohio: Boards of Election face Friday deadline to finish security updates ahead of March primary | John Kosich/News5Cleveland

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose will tell you that talk of efforts to interfere in our elections isn’t talk, it’s a reality. “There are foreign adversaries who want to undermine the credibility of this thing that is really fundamental to our way of life as Americans and that is the ability to elect our leaders,” LaRose told News 5 from Israel, where he was asked to speak this week at a cyber-security conference in Tel Aviv. “They’ve heard about some of the work we’re doing in Ohio where in many ways we’re leading the nation with a very aggressive cyber-security posture that we’ve put in place to protect the integrity of our elections,” he said. “While I’ve been here I’ve had the chance to meet with my counterparts from Israel’s electoral commission as well, so there’s a great exchange of information between the Israeli experts that work to keep their election’s safe and secure and myself.” The state’s county boards of election this week have been busy completing LaRose’s task of making sure they are all individually protected against attack — a 34-point checklist that they have until January 31 to complete.

Pennsylvania: Northampton County Election Commission Board says no to electronic poll books | Peter Blanchard/The Morning Call

Fears of another Election Day fiasco in Northampton County have public officials feeling uneasy about implementing modernized voting technology — even at the risk of waiting weeks after votes are cast for official election results. Despite the urging of Northampton County Director of Administration Charles Dertinger, the election commission board voted 4-1 Thursday against recommending a roughly quarter-million dollar purchase of 350 electronic poll books ahead of the April 28 primary election. Last week, Tenex Software Solutions representatives provided a demonstration of the electronic poll books — iPads containing Apple’s encryption technology and reconfigured to disable Wi-Fi capabilities — to election board members and County Council last week. Dertinger requested the board make its decision at that meeting, but board Chairwoman Maudeania Hornik said it would be imprudent to rush into a decision given the numerous issues with new voting machines in the November election.

Pennsylvania: New voting machines. Sweeping election reforms. What could go wrong in 2020? | Ford Turner/The Morning Call

Held three months to the day before the Pennsylvania’s presidential-year primary, a legislative hearing on the readiness of the state’s voting infrastructure was a mixture of reassurance and concern. The focal point of those who testified before an all-Republican array of senators on the Senate Majority Policy Committee was implementation of the just-passed Act 77 of 2019, the most sweeping set of Pennsylvania election reforms in decades. Worries also were expressed about voter privacy and delays in seeing the results election night. Faced with the welter of changes state and county officials must adopt before the April 28 primary ― mail-in ballots, changed registration deadlines and the elimination of straight-party voting among them ― the guarded tone was obvious in an answer given by Lehigh County Chief Clerk Tim Benyo. Asked by committee Chairman Sen. David Argall of Schuylkill County what might happen in the coming election, Benyo said, “I don’t foresee anything worse than what we saw in November, even with the addition of Act 77.”

Puerto Rico: Internet Voting Plan Threatens Election Security: ACLU | Shannon Bond/ NPR

Puerto Ricans could be casting their ballots online only in the next eight years, according to a bill that is expected to pass this week. Civil liberties advocates are ringing alarm bells over this plan to shift voting online, warning that the move threatens election security and voting rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and its Puerto Rico chapter urged the island’s governor, Wanda Vázquez, to veto a bill containing the Internet voting plan. “There is no secure way to hold elections online,” they wrote in a letter to the governor on Wednesday. “This measure is misguided, dangerous, and will needlessly expose Puerto Rico’s voting system to hacking and disruption.” The ACLU said “such disruption will only result in greater public mistrust of key democratic institutions.” The online voting plan is part of a bill to reform the U.S. territory’s electoral code. The bill is expected to be approved by the legislature by the end of this week. The measure calls for Puerto Rico’s electoral commission to create an Internet voting program that could overhaul the way all the island’s citizens cast their ballots within eight years.

Editorials: Shelby County Tennessee needs cheap, secure hand-marked paper ballots | Joe Towns and Marlene Strube/The Daily Memphian

Sometimes, the low-tech solution is the better one. Let’s say you want a dedicated tool to look up local phone numbers confidentially. You could buy a $500 computer plus subscription fee to search the online White Pages, hope you’ll have reliable Internet connection, and bet that no one is monitoring your searches. Or, you could get the phone book for free and use it reliably and in privacy. Shelby County is faced with a similar choice right now. Everyone agrees we need to buy new voting equipment for the 2020 election. And that it should have some kind of paper record of votes which can be checked against the computer in case of a computer glitch, hacking or just a really close race. But the Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC) is currently considering an expensive “electronic pen” system in which voters would use a touch-screen computer to mark paper ballots, when we could just give voters a paper ballot and a pencil. The low-tech, hand-marked paper ballot approach would be simpler, more secure and half the price.

National: Election Officials To Convene Amid Historic Focus on Voting And Interference | Pam Fessler/NPR

Top election officials from all 50 states are meeting in Washington this week to prepare for 2020 — a gathering amid widespread concern over whether the upcoming elections will be fair and accurate, as well as free of the kind of foreign interference that marred the 2016 campaign. Despite major government efforts to upgrade security, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that about 41% of Americans surveyed do not think the country is prepared to protect the U.S. election system from another attack. Voters also say their biggest concern is disinformation, followed by voter fraud and voter suppression. Forty-four percent think it’s likely that many votes will not actually be counted in 2020. While most voters have confidence in their state and local governments to run a fair election, 43% do not think those officials have done enough to make sure that there’s no foreign interference. Many more blame President Trump. Fifty-six percent say he has done little or nothing to keep the elections safe. A slim majority think the president, who has repeatedly questioned Russian tampering in 2016, actually encourages foreign interference.

National: It takes too long to detect hacking after elections. Here’s 3 ways to help. | Jeremy Epstein/Fifth Domain

In 33 states in America, millions of voters are still at risk of having their ballots deliberately changed, uncounted, undercounted, misrecorded or otherwise subverted. Why? Simply because these states either permit some form of Internet voting or because one or more parts of their voting processes are connected to the Internet. This should disturb us. What is doubly worrying is the fact that, even if an intrusion is detected in these systems, there is no way to determine with certainty the impact on vote counts from the malicious hacks without paper ballots. There is no paper-based, traceable record of citizens’ votes without paper ballots. This means there is no way to reliably audit the election results. While paper ballots don’t prevent hacks, they can nullify the impacts of hacks because they allow authorities to reliably and accurately recount votes. The ability to retrace elections is critical in many ways: to restore the will of the people by accurately reflecting their votes, and to maintain confidence in our elections and our democracy.

National: FBI breach notice rules lauded by states, but some want more | Derek B. Johnson/FCW

Under a recent policy change, the FBI will notify states if local election systems are hacked, but some state officials and lawmakers want the feds to commit to informing a broader range of stakeholders. The federal government, in particular the FBI, have taken heat for taking three years to notify the Florida state government and members of Congress that voter registration systems in two counties were breached by Russian hackers leading up to the 2016 elections. While U.S. officials have said they do not have any evidence that suggests voting machines or tallies were compromised, security experts say bad actors tampering with registration data can still sow confusion and wreak havoc on election day. Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said he and his counterparts in other states spent years pressing the federal government to notify states about local election hacks, arguing that many counties and municipalities lack the technical resources to effectively respond to a breach of their election systems. “They’re not in a position to give any attention to what was going on and to try to correct the issue, and so if [the feds aren’t] contacting us, what’s the value of calling anyone?” he told FCW. “And when we explained that to [the federal government,] they understood.”

National: Nonprofit expands free security services for campaigns as election season heats up | Cat Zakrzewski/The Washington Post

Political campaigns might not have the time or money to seek out tech talent and services in their busiest season, even as concerns loom about election hacking and interference. A political odd couple is trying to change that. Defending Digital Campaigns — founded by Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, and Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager — is offering campaigns a wide range of free and discounted cybersecurity services. The nonprofit organization, which acts as a clearinghouse between campaigns and the companies, announced yesterday that it broadly expanded its industry partners to include tech heavyweights such as Microsoft and Cloudflare. DDC is designed to be a one-stop shop for campaigns to get protections against phishing, websites and mobile app security, multi-factor authentication through security keys, and more. “DDC will create even more value for campaigns by housing a number of these offerings from different companies,” Ginny Badanes, director of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, tells me. “We think this will help increase adoption of these services and ultimately make campaigns more secure.” Microsoft is offering its suite of Office and business products for campaigns at a discount. It’s also a more expedient way to ensure campaigns can access their services, especially in a complicated regulatory environment, companies say. DDC secured Federal Election Commission approval to provide campaigns with free or discounted services last year. By partnering with the organization, companies don’t have to seek out individual approvals — a process that can take several months.

Editorials: The loser of November’s election may not concede. Their voters won’t, either. | Richard L. Hasen/The Washington Post

When the polls closed on Nov. 5, 2019, the initial count showed the governor of Kentucky, Republican Matt Bevin, losing to his Democratic challenger, Andy Beshear. But rather than concede that he fell short in what should have been an easy reelection, Bevin claimed that “irregularities” had muddled the result — though he produced no evidence to support his accusations. At first, some Kentucky legislative leaders appeared to back him, and some pointed to the legislature’s power to resolve an election dispute and choose the governor regardless of the vote. But Bevin was not popular even within his own party, and eventually, he had to concede when the local GOP did not go along with him. We could imagine a similar scenario this November: What would happen if President Trump had an early lead that evaporated as votes were counted, and then he refused to concede? The idea isn’t too far-fetched; Trump has raised it himself. Before the 2016 election, he wouldn’t agree to accept the results if he lost. After winning in the electoral college but losing the popular count by about 3 million votes, Trump claimed — with no evidence whatsoever — that at least 3 million fraudulent votes had been cast for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. He set up an “election integrity” commission headed by then-Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach to try to prove that “voter fraud” is a major problem. But after the commission faced attacks from the left and the right for demanding state voter records with an apparent plan to use them to call for stricter registration rules, Trump disbanded it, with no work accomplished. In 2018, the president criticized elections in Florida and California, where late-counted votes shifted toward Democrats, suggesting without evidence that there was foul play.

California: State OKs Los Angeles County’s New Voting Machines — With A Whole Lot Of Caveats (Backup Paper Ballots, For One)| Libby Denkman/LAist

The state of California has given Los Angeles County’s new voting equipment its seal of approval — with some significant caveats. On Friday, Secretary of State Alex Padilla granted conditional certification to the Voting Solutions for All People 2.0 system, including new ‘ballot marking devices’ that the county designed and built from the ground up. It’s making history as the first publicly owned voting system in the U.S. to be certified for widespread use. But the county must meet a stack of requirements before primary election voters get their hands on the machines starting Feb. 22. “Elections officials have a duty to make voting both as secure and as accessible as possible,” Padilla said in a press release. “As part of my certification of VSAP, I am insisting on some essential modifications to the system and requiring on-going reports from Los Angeles County so that we can continue to improve the voting experience for Angelenos.”

California: State OKs highly questioned Los Angeles County voting system | Frank Bajak/Associate Press

California’s secretary of state on Friday approved Los Angeles County’s new publicly owned computerized voting system — a first of its kind for the nation — but is requiring modifications to address serious security and technical problems identified in testing. Secretary of State Alex Padilla is also requiring that all polling stations offer voters the option of using hand-marked paper ballots in the March 3 presidential primary in the nation’s most populous county. His office also notes in a statement on its conditional certification that an estimated 63% of county voters will be voting by mail using hand-marked paper ballots during the primary. Election security experts says all U.S. voters, unless hindered by disabilities, should use hand-marked paper ballots that are available for audits and recounts. Instead, only about 70% do, and elections in the U.S. are dominated by t hree voting equipment and services companies that control nearly 90 percent of the market. Their black-box touchscreen systems have been widely criticized by computer scientists as highly vulnerable to tampering. A subsidiary of one of those companies, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Nebraska, was blamed by an outside audit for sloppy system integration that left 118,000 names off printed voter roles in Los Angeles County during the 2018 primary.

Iowa: Caucus Voting App Stirs Security Concerns | Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

Democrats will record the votes from the Iowa presidential caucuses in just over a week using a smartphone app, a procedure that has stirred questions about security. Party leaders said that the mobile app would make it easier and faster to report results from some 1,700 caucus sites. But critics expressed concern about the reliability of the app amid warnings that cyber adversaries could seek to disrupt the 2020 elections. Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, who has studied election security, called the idea a “security nightmare,” and said that cellphones were difficult to protect against the range of possible threats. The caucus workers will use the app on their personal smartphones, which Mr. Jones said could be vulnerable, depending on how well the workers take care of their devices.

Kansas: County, lawmakers battle to make voting easier this year | Dion Lefler/The Wichita Eagle

Sedgwick County is turning to the state Legislature to try to force Secretary of State Scott Schwab to let county voters choose their own polling place in this year’s upcoming elections. A Republican lawmaker has agreed to introduce a bill to let the County Commission change the voting procedure without Schwabb’s blessing. Meanwhile, the top Senate Democrat says he may take Schwab to court in an effort to make him comply with a law passed last year. The law at issue would replace traditional polling places with “voting centers” around the community. Any voter could vote at any voting center, instead of having to go to an assigned polling place on election day. Commissioners and legislators say they think Schwab has dragged his feet on implementing the law. “I’m very frustrated over this thing,” said county Commissioner Jim Howell. “We passed this law last year, we pushed it forward late in the (legislative) session because we wanted to have this ready for the 2020 elections.” “Now here we are eight or nine months later and he hasn’t written any rules and regulations yet. Why?” Schwab says he supports the new law, but crafting the regulations and ensuring necessary cybersecurity precautions is a complicated process that won’t be done in time for this year’s presidential and Senate elections.

Editorials: Counting on technology: Machines can malfunction, and election results ought to be verified | Keene Sentinel

In 17 days, Granite State voters will head to the polls to exercise what is, arguably, their most well-known right and duty: voting in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire presidential primary. When they do, many will cast votes counted by machine. We hope all will go well. But there’s no guarantee. Absent a campaign-requested recount, there won’t be any verification of the results those machines offer. And that’s because the state’s highest elections officials refuse to allow it. A handful of Monadnock Region residents has been sounding the alarm regarding the vulnerability of voting machines in New Hampshire for several years. And, as noted in a recent report by Sentinel staff writer Jake Lahut, the N.H. Secretary of State’s Office has been refusing to allow local polling officials to even conduct random cross checks by hand. Such hand counts, or audits, could go a long way toward putting voters’ minds at ease regarding the efficacy of the machines upon which so much of our election infrastructure relies. It’s not just a worry for the conspiracy-minded; beyond the idea of Russian or Chinese or, now, perhaps even Iranian hackers gaining access to local or statewide results, there’s the simple question of reliability.

Pennsylvania: Groups challenging voting machine switch gears, counties remain in limbo | Emily Previti/PA Post

More than 2 million voters in three counties will remain in limbo a bit longer after a voting machine lawsuit changed course late Friday. Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin Brobson had scheduled a hearing Tuesday over whether the ExpressVote XL should be shelved for Pennsylvania’s nominating contest April 28, while the court fully considered the case. But late Friday afternoon, the plaintiffs withdrew their motion for a preliminary injunction. They say they’ll instead ask the court to fast-track the lawsuit – but not when that might happen. The change follows a hearing Thursday where the Pa. Department of State’s lawyers said a court action intended to be temporary could have permanent effects in this case. If counties buy and implement new voting machines to comply, they wouldn’t be in a position to switch back to the XL if the final decision later upholds the machine’s certification, attorney Michele Hangley said.

Tennessee: Sixth Circuit affirms dismissal of Shelby County voting machine lawsuit | Bill Dries/The Daily Memphian

A federal appeals court has agreed with a Memphis federal court decision tossing out a case seeking to do away with the touchscreen voting machines used in Shelby County elections. The Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling released Friday, Jan. 24, affirmed the earlier decision by U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker to dismiss the lawsuit by the group Shelby Advocates for Valid Elections – or SAVE – based on a lack of standing by the plaintiffs. SAVE sued the Shelby County Election Commission, Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Elections Coordinator Mark Goins. The group has also been pushing the election commission to move away from computers entirely to a system of hand-marked paper ballots that would be run through an optical scanner for tabulating. The election commission is considering a new voting system that could be in place this election year. And election commissioners have looked at voting systems that use a touchscreen machine but include a paper audit trail – a printout for a voter to proofread and then put in a ballot box once they complete the voting process.

Virginia: Months from 2020 election, Virginia updates cybersecurity, voting equipment rules | Max Smith/WTOP

Virginia elections officials are taking new cybersecurity steps as part of new voting-equipment policies ahead of the 2020 presidential election. More significant security measures are planned starting in 2021. Under new plans for voting systems and electronic poll books that are set to be adopted by the State Board of Elections next week, the companies that make voting machines and the check-in systems used by local elections officials in the state will update all existing software to at least meet 2015 standards. “In order to ensure equipment security during the 2020 November Presidential election, the Department has worked with the election vendor community to develop an implementation plan to upgrade localities to standardized versions of equipment,” said briefing documents for the board. The transition plan is meant to keep costs and a last-minute rush by localities to a minimum. The Democratic presidential primary is March 3. There are town elections in May, followed by the congressional primaries in June and the general election in November.

Washington: Voting by Phone Gets a Big Test, but There Are Concerns | Emily S. Rueb/The New York Times

More than a million registered voters in the Seattle area can now cast a ballot for an obscure election using a smartphone or computer. Organizers are calling the pilot program the largest mobile voting effort in the country. Julie Wise, the director of elections in King County, said the election would be “a key step in moving toward electronic access” for voters across the region, in a statement released on Wednesday from Tusk Philanthropies, the nonprofit partnering with the county’s board of elections. The vote in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, will fill an open spot on the board of the King Conservation District, an agency that manages natural resources. Beginning this week, eligible voters will be able to use a smartphone or computer to log into a portal created by Democracy Live, a Seattle-based company that receives government funding. “There’s no special app, there’s no electronic storage of votes. Instead a voter’s choice is recorded onto a PDF, which they then verify before submission,” Ms. Wise said in an email on Thursday. Once the ballots are received, the board will follow the same processing protocols that are used for mail-in ballots, she added.

West Virginia: Bill To Allow Internet Voting For West Virginians With Disabilities Passes Legislature | West Virginia Public Broadcasting

The West Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill that would allow voters with certain disabilities to vote electronically in the upcoming election.  Senate Bill 94 will provide West Virginians with disabilities the same electronic voting ability the West Virginia Secretary of State allowed for overseas military members in 2018. It’s the first bill both chambers of the Legislature have voted on this year. The bill now heads to the governor’s desk for final approval. Donald Kersey, general counsel to the Secretary of State’s office, said Thursday qualifying voters will know within a month what kind of electronic voting methods will be available to them, assuming Gov. Jim Justice signs the bill. He said because Tusk-Montgomery Philanthropies, a mobile voting advocacy group, has offered to pay for the associated equipment, implementing the bill won’t cost anything to the state or the counties responsible for offering and collecting the ballots. The same group covered mobile voting costs in the last election.

Editorials: Resist push for online ballot box | The Seattle Times

The ubiquity of online life comes with devastating vulnerabilities. Even one of the world’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, is reportedly not safe from hackers of electronic devices. Despite this well-established risk, Washington elections officials are moving in disjointed directions about internet security. In Olympia, Secretary of State Kim Wyman wants to bar emailed ballot returns because of potential fraud and network tampering via attachment. In King County, Elections Director Julie Wise is aiding a local public agency’s experiment with online voting. The King County move is a badly flawed approach to broadening elections access. Washington’s elections must — without exception — be kept safe from online tampering. The best way to do this is to keep elections computers entirely off the internet. House Bill 2647 and Senate Bill 6412 are Wyman’s request legislation that would ban returning ballots by email. The proposal would close a vulnerability without meaningfully limiting access for military and overseas voters. Their current extended voting window of 30 or 45 days to download, print and return ballots reasonably allows for international postal delays.

National: Analysts question whether FBI election cybersecurity changes are robust enough | Jonathan Greig/TechRepublic

The FBI released new guidelines on how it will approach cyberattacks on elections after facing years of criticism from lawmakers across the country for their response to Russian intrusion attempts during the 2016 election. State officials, particularly those in Florida, were incensed when the Mueller Report revealed that two county voting databases were breached by Russian hackers ahead of the 2016 election. The FBI never told state-level officials and only coordinated with people in the counties that had been hit, waiting nearly two years until meeting and explaining the situation to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The new guidelines, explained on a media call last Thursday and in a press release last Friday, say the FBI will notify a state’s chief election official and other local election workers in the event of any cyberattack. “Understanding that mitigation of such incidents often hinges on timely notification, the FBI has established a new internal policy outlining how the FBI will notify state and local officials responsible for administering election infrastructure of cyber activity targeting their infrastructure,” the FBI statement said.