National: Intelligence Chief Names New Election Security Oversight Official | Julian E. Barnes/The New York Times

An experienced official will oversee election security intelligence across the government in a newly created senior position, the director of national intelligence announced on Friday as part of an effort to improve coordination and speed response to attacks by foreign governments. Intelligence officials said the new post reflects the reality that influence operations by Russia, China and other countries are likely to continue indefinitely. Shelby Pierson, who worked on intelligence issues surrounding the 2018 midterm elections, was named to the post, which will cover both potential attacks on voting infrastructure and influence campaigns. Administration critics praised the appointment but said it did not obviate the need for a director at the National Security Council to coordinate not just intelligence but also the response to foreign interference campaigns. And critics in Congress warned that President Trump’s skepticism over foreign influence campaigns continues to undermine the government response. Ms. Pierson’s appointment will help intelligence agencies direct resources to election security and “bring the strongest level of support to this critical issue,” said Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, who called it an “enduring challenge.” Mr. Coats also said he was ordering all of the intelligence agencies with a role in election security to appoint a senior official to oversee issues of foreign influence and infrastructure attacks. These officials will form an Election Executive and Leadership Board to ensure intelligence agencies are properly focused on voting security issues.

National: “We’re not ready” for foreign election interference in 2020, says Rep. Adam Schiff | Eric Johnson/Vox

In May, Facebook refused to remove a deceptively edited viral video that made Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi look drunk — a decision that does not bode well for how Silicon Valley will handle disinformation and election interference in 2020, Rep. Adam Schiff says. And for that matter, he said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Congress and the voting public aren’t prepared to deal with those things either. “The tech companies aren’t ready,” Schiff said. “They don’t have, I think, their policies fully thought out yet. The government isn’t ready. We don’t have the technologies yet to be able to detect more sophisticated fakes.” “And the public, by and large, when you bring up ‘deepfake,’ they don’t know what you’re referring to,” he added. “And so we don’t have much time. It’s eight months until the primaries begin to try to prepare the public, prepare ourselves, determine what other steps need to be taken to protect ourselves from this kind of disinformation.”

National: Election security to take back seat at Mueller hearing | Maggie Miller/TheHill

This week’s much-anticipated hearing with former special counsel Robert Mueller promises to be full of high political drama. But election security — a key focus of the Mueller report — isn’t likely to garner much attention from lawmakers. Mueller is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees in back-to-back hearings Wednesday to discuss the findings of his 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The first volume of the report was devoted to Russian efforts to interfere in the elections through social media and hacking operations, with Mueller later emphasizing in rare public remarks that election security is an issue that “deserves the attention of every American.” “I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our elections,” Mueller said in a public statement to the press in May. His lengthy report detailed how Russian actors hacked into the computer system of the Democratic National Committee, engineered a social media disinformation campaign that favored President Trump and conducted “computer intrusion operations” against those working on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In the wake of the report’s release, election security debates ramped up on Capitol Hill, with Republicans and Democrats strongly disagreeing on what steps, if any, Congress should take ahead of the 2020 elections. The Democratic-led House has passed several election security bills, while the GOP-controlled Senate has mostly avoided voting on them and others, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) citing concerns about federalizing elections and claiming agencies already doing enough to address the problem.

National: Microsoft reveals election-related investigation findings | CISO Magazine

Microsoft says it has detected more than 740 intrusion attempts by state-sponsored attackers last year targeting the U.S.-based political parties, campaigns, and other democracy-focused organizations, who are subscribed to Microsoft’s AccountGuard service. The Microsoft AccountGuard provides free cyber threat detection services to election-related candidates, campaigns, and other groups. The Tech giant revealed the probe findings at the Aspen Security Forum, where it demonstrated a voting system ElectionGuard software. Microsoft said the new voting system offers secure and verifiable voting experience. “Since the launch of Microsoft AccountGuard last August, we have uncovered attacks specifically targeting organizations that are fundamental to democracy. We have steadily expanded AccountGuard, our threat notification service for political campaigns, parties, and democracy-focused nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to include 26 countries across four continents,” Microsoft said in a blog post.

National: Democrats to Press Republicans on Election Security Ahead of Mueller Testimony | VoA News

Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate are expected to issue a call Tuesday for Republicans to join in passing legislation to improve election security. The move comes a day ahead of special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony to two House committees Wednesday about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Democrats plan to highlight several House-passed bills and Senate proposals in increased security ahead of the next national elections in 2020. Congressional Democrats and Republicans remain at odds over how to address election security issues three years after Russia’s interference. Last month, the Democratic-controlled House passed a bill requiring paper ballots at all polling stations. However, almost all House Republicans opposed the measure, arguing that paper ballots are more susceptible to tampering.

National: Why getting election security right for 2020 matters | J.M. Porup/CSO Online

How much election security is enough? The answer: Enough to convince a losing candidate that they lost. Will that happen for the 2020 elections? Probably not. “Is it enough? How much is enough?” Herb Lin, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and co-author of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center’s “Securing American Elections” report, asks. “Unfortunately it’s not a technical answer. Enough means you’ve done enough so that you can persuade the loser of an election that in fact the voting machines weren’t hacked.” “You have to take into account the possibility that the loser will rally his troops and complain about the result,” he adds. “The election machinery, both organizational and technical, all of that has to be of sufficiently high quality, and resistant to attack, that you can persuade the loser of an election that they fairly lost.” That makes election security as much of a political problem as it is a technical problem. Voters must have confidence that the voting was fair, regardless of how much money is spent or what security controls are put in place. That makes securing election infrastructure categorically different than almost any other information security challenge today. At present many jurisdictions are struggling to escape the bottomless pit of despair paperless voting, and that’s a no-brainer. But once we raise the bar from wow-crazy-bad to meh-just-not-great, how do we reach a plateau of sustainably trustworthy voting security?

National: Russian oligarchs in Britain scrutinised by US investigation into election meddling | Con Coughlin/Telegraph

US Senators investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election are renewing their focus on the activities of Russian oligarchs based in Britain. US congressional investigators say they are particularly interested in interviewing alleged associates of Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is known to have close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As part of its ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign, the US Senate Intelligence Committee has now written a formal letter to a London-based security consultant requesting his presence in Washington to give evidence. In the letter, a copy of which has been seen by The Telegraph, the bipartisan committee of US Senators wants British-based security consultant Walter Soriano to attend a special closed session in Washington to answer questions about his alleged association with Mr Deripaska, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing, as well as other key figures named in its Russian investigation. The committee also expressed an interest in Mr Soriano’s possible links with two former MI6 officers, Christopher Steele and Christopher Burrows, who were responsible for producing a highly damaging “dossier” on US President Donald Trump’s alleged ties with Russia.

Editorials: People privy to the intelligence are convinced another electoral attack is coming | Greg Sargent/The Washington Post

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had a conversation with Vox’s Kara Swisher that should worry anyone who thinks our elections should be free from foreign interference. Needless to say, this evidently doesn’t include President Trump, who has basically invited another round of foreign electoral sabotage, or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who refuses to allow the Senate to vote on any of the numerous bills that have been proposed to shore up our political system against such sabotage. So that basically rules out any serious legislative response in advance of the next attack. But what remains striking is how convinced Democrats who have seen the intelligence are that this is really going to happen. Schiff points out that Facebook recently refused to remove a viral video that was edited to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) look drunk, and notes that neither the tech companies nor our own government are prepared:

“The tech companies aren’t ready,” Schiff said. “They don’t have, I think, their policies fully thought out yet. The government isn’t ready. We don’t have the technologies yet to be able to detect more sophisticated fakes.”

“And the public, by and large, when you bring up ‘deepfake,’ they don’t know what you’re referring to,” he added. “And so we don’t have much time. It’s eight months until the primaries begin to try to prepare the public, prepare ourselves, determine what other steps need to be taken to protect ourselves from this kind of disinformation.”

Georgia: North Fulton County cities frustrated by high Fulton election costs | Arielle Kass/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A dispute between Fulton County and its cities about the cost to run elections has frustrated leaders and led the county to cut back on early voting this fall. Officials in several north Fulton cities said they were shocked by what they called excessive costs to run city elections and demanded the county look for ways to save money.That led to a decision by the county to reduce the number of polling places, hours and days for early voting.“This makes me even angrier,” Roswell Mayor Lori Henry said upon learning that the East Roswell library was one of the proposed polling locations that wouldn’t open for early voting in the fall. “I am so frustrated with this and I am so frustrated with Fulton County.”The county had originally proposed opening 16 early voting locations, but reduced the number to nine after Henry and others said they thought the costs were too high. Roswell elections were slated to cost nearly $535,000, more than $200,000 more than the cost had been in 2017.The city’s elections are now estimated to cost about $375,000, a figure that is still more than $60,000 higher that what Roswell budgeted. “Fulton doesn’t really have competition,” Henry said. “They have us over a barrel on elections.”While some Fulton County cities perform their own elections and one, Mountain Park, contracts with Cherokee County, the other cities are required to contract with Fulton if they don’t want to go it alone, Henry said. She’s asked Sen. John Albers, R-Alpharetta, to put forth legislation that would allow cities to contract with neighboring counties to perform elections. Albers confirmed that he plans to file that legislation, saying he supports “giving our cities options for running elections to reduce the cost and improve the experience.”

Pennsylvania: State needs to commit to voting machines | Herald Standard

Gov. Tom Wolf is opting for “Plan B” to help counties pay 60 percent of their costs tied to acquiring new voting machines with voter-verifiable paper systems. It’s unfortunate that the General Assembly and governor haven’t been able to achieve an accord through the preferable legislative process, but the voting-machines funding situation is another example of progress stymied by too many issues being lumped into one bill. In this case, voting-machine funding was included in legislation that would have eliminated straight-party voting and extend the absentee ballot deadline. Wolf opposes ending straight-party voting and vetoed the bill, even though helping counties pay for new voting machines is a big priority for him. Presumably, extending the absentee ballot deadline is an issue upon which the Legislature and governor agree. Now, for better or worse, in the aftermath of the veto, Wolf has announced a plan to proceed with the voting-machines funding in question by borrowing up to $90 million — a move that will require approval from the board of a state economic development financing agency, the vehicle through which the governor is seeking to pursue the loan.

India: Opposition parties plan big revolt against electronic voting machines | Manan Kumar/DNA

After getting no relief from either the Election Commission or the Supreme Court on their petitions on the alleged misuse of “doubtful” electronic voting machines (EVMs) during the recent Lok Sabha elections, the opposition parties are gearing up to launch yet another big battle. While West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Sunday explicitly blamed the EVMs for BJP’s stunning victory in Lok Sabha elections and called for use of ballot boxes, the Congress is planning to convene a meeting of the opposition parties to discuss the future course of action on EVMs after the budget session. “The Lok Sabha election in 2019 is a mystery, not history. We do not want EVMs. We want the ballot box to be brought back,” said Banerjee at her Kolkata rally on Sunday accusing BJP of winning the Lok Sabha polls by cheating- using EVMs, CRPF and Election Commission. Still trying to overcome the shock of a humiliating defeat, the Congress is hoping reciprocity from several opposition parties, including Trinamool Congress, to join the chorus of demanding the restoration of ballot papers in place of electronic voting in future elections. Echoing similar sentiments, Banerjee too has called for use of ballot papers in coming Panchayat and Municipal elections.

Russia: Protests return to Moscow as opposition candidates are banned from a crucial election | Vladimir Kara-Murza/The Washington Post

More than 20,000 Muscovites gathered Saturday on Andrei Sakharov Avenue — the site of the mass anti-Putin protests in 2011 — to demand that the authorities rescind their ban on opposition candidates participating in a crucial Moscow election. “We do not exist for them, they only notice us when it’s time to pay taxes,” Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent anticorruption activist, told the rally. “From now on, there will be no taxation without representation. … I am proposing a peaceful public compromise: either you register every candidate, or next Saturday we will gather for a rally at Moscow City Hall!” The election for the Moscow City Duma — the legislative body that passes laws and adopts the budget for Russia’s 12-million-strong capital and its most important political center — will be held on Sept. 8. But the most consequential fraud has already been committed. Last week, Moscow’s electoral commissions — bodies that are supposed to act as impartial arbiters in administering elections but are in reality the first line of defense for the incumbent government — disqualified nearly all viable opposition candidates from the ballot. For weeks, some of Moscow’s (and Russia’s) best-known democracy activists — including Dmitri Gudkov, once the lone opposition voice in the country’s parliament; Ilya Yashin, a colleague of the late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov who was recently elected to lead one of the city’s municipal districts; and Lyubov Sobol, the lead lawyer at Navalny’s Anticorruption Foundation — raced to meet an impossible threshold: collect some 5,000 signatures each to get on the ballot. The task was made more formidable not only by logistical challenges in the midst of the vacation season, but also because each signature on the petition means volunteering one’s personal information for the government’s database of opposition supporters.

Voting Blogs: U.S. Elections Are Still Vulnerable to Foreign Hacking | Tim Lau/Brennan Center for Justice

Election officials warn that the time is running out for Congress to bolster security before the 2020 race. The warnings follow a recent statement from a senior U.S. intelligence official confirming that Russia, China, and Iran are attempting to manipulate public opinion ahead of the 2020 elections. And earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI reported that Russian hacking efforts in 2016 were more extensive than originally understood, targeting elections in all 50 states. Congress took a major step last year toward helping states boost their election security efforts by approving $380 million in grant funds through the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). States have started to put that funding to work and are expected to spend 85 percent of that money by the 2020 election, much of it on cybersecurity, updated voting equipment, and election audits, according to estimates by the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC). But despite those efforts, many election security projects at the state level remain unfunded or underfunded, as outlined in Defending Elections, a new paper authored by a bipartisan group of organizations including the Brennan Center, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, R Street Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security. Defending Elections provides case studies from six states analyzing how they allocated their HAVA grants and the outstanding needs for additional election security funding. “State and local election officials need support from the federal government,” said Liz Howard, who is a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, was the former deputy commissioner for the Virginia Department of Elections, and co-authored the Defending Elections report. “They are on the front lines, yet many, especially those in rural localities, simply lack the resources to implement additional election security projects to further strengthen our election infrastructure.”

National: Election Assistance Commission, Hungry for Funds, Now Pays for Officials to Get to Office | Jessica Huseman/ProPublica

For years, it was how things worked at the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency charged with helping America’s thousands of local officials run elections: If you served as one of the agency’s four commissioners, making more than $150,000 a year, you lived in and around Silver Spring, Maryland, where the agency’s office is located. The reasons were straightforward: The agency’s small staff needed daily guidance from its leadership, and its modest budget was not meant to pay for commissioners to travel from out of state. But this year, the EAC’s executive director, Brian Newby, allowed two of the four commissioners — including the agency’s chairwoman — to work outside the Washington, D.C., area and agreed to pick up the costs of their travel to and from the office. Christie McCormick and Donald Palmer, the two Republican commissioners, work most days from out of state — McCormick, the agency chairwoman, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Palmer in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida. Newby appears to have approved the changes on his own. Current and former employees of the agency say no formal announcement was made, and the agency’s full slate of commissioners, which includes two Democrats, does not appear to have taken a vote on the change in practice. The disclosures, contained in answers to questions the EAC provided to a congressional oversight committee, come as the agency has repeatedly claimed it is underfinanced and critics say it is not doing enough to assist election administrators around the country at a time of genuine threats to the integrity of the nation’s elections. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the Democratic chairwoman of the House Administration Committee, which oversees the EAC, said in a letter to the commission that news of the working arrangements for McCormick and Palmer “raises concerns about how much taxpayer money is being used to accommodate travel between duty stations and agency headquarters when the agency is avowedly struggling with its current funding levels.”

National: Intel chief Coats establishes election security adviser position | Maggie Miller/The Hill

The intelligence community has crafted a position to oversee threats to election security, officials announced Friday, the latest effort to shore up security heading into the 2020 presidential elections. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Daniel Coats has appointed Shelby Pierson to serve as the first “election threats executive” (ETE), tasking her to be the intelligence community’s “principal advisor” on election security threats. Pierson served as the crisis manager for election security for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the 2018 midterm elections, and has worked in the intelligence community for more than 20 years. Coats praised Pierson and said her “knowledge and experience make her the right person to lead this critical mission.” The DNI noted in a statement that “Election security is an enduring challenge and a top priority for the IC [intelligence community]. In order to build on our successful approach to the 2018 elections, the IC must properly align its resources to bring the strongest level of support to this critical issue.” Along with establishing the new position, Coats also directed all intelligence agencies that have a role in securing elections to designate a lead executive to work with the ETE to help coordinate election security efforts for the administration.

National: What six states reveal about the price of 2020 election security | Bill Theobald/The Fulcrum

States are taking steps to protect their voting systems from the sort of cyberattacks that marked the 2016 presidential election, but they lack the funds to do all that’s needed. That is the conclusion of a report released Thursday by four groups that monitor voting security or advocate for additional federal intervention to bolster cybersecurity for the political system: the Brennan Center for Justice, R Street Institute, Alliance for Securing Democracy and the University of Pittsburgh. They sampled what is happening in six states, chosen in part because hacking was attempted in several of them in the past few years. In Illinois, for example, special counsel Robert Mueller’s report found that Russian operatives hacked into the state database of registered voters and extracted some data before they were blocked. One common theme among the states is their hunger for more federal aid to replace aging voting machines. As the report points out, the states all tapped into the $380 million approved by Congress last year for election security grants to the states — but could have used far more. The House has voted to allocate another $600 million for security grants before November 2020, but the Senate has not yet begun to write the spending bill that might contain similar funding. The delay is knotted up in a much larger debate about the overall size of the federal budget for the coming year.

National: U.S. Senator Schumer asks FBI, FTC to probe Russia’s FaceApp over security concerns | Elizabeth Culliford and Kanishka Singh/Reuters

U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called on the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission to conduct a national security and privacy investigation into FaceApp, a face-editing photo app developed in Russia, in a letter sent on Wednesday. The viral smartphone application, which has seen a new surge of popularity due to a filter that ages photos of users’ faces, requires “full and irrevocable access to their personal photos and data,” which could pose “national security and privacy risks for millions of U.S. citizens,” Schumer said in his letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and FTC Chairman Joe Simons. The Democratic National Committee also sent out an alert to the party’s 2020 presidential candidates on Wednesday warning them against using the app, pointing to its Russian provenance. In the email, seen by Reuters and first reported by CNN, DNC security chief Bob Lord also urged Democratic presidential campaigns to delete the app immediately if they or their staff had already used it. There is no evidence that FaceApp provides user data to the Russian government.

National: Voting by Phone Is Easy. But Is It Secure? | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

For the first time in a presidential election, voters in two upcoming Democratic caucuses will be able to vote using their phones. The Democratic Party announced this month that Iowans and Nevadans in February will be able to opt out of the traditional caucus experience and vote using the keypads on their cellphones or landlines. Party leaders say the change will make the caucus process more inclusive, especially for members of the military and others who can’t easily caucus in person, such as people with disabilities and voters who live in remote areas. … Voting by phone is voting through the internet, either through mobile apps or the tabulating and downloading process, said Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, an election integrity nonprofit that advocates for a paper trail in voting. That opens the door to malicious actors, like the foreign intelligence agents who attempted to hack U.S. state and local voting systems during the last presidential race. In light of those attempts, many states are going back to paper ballots or requiring a paper trail to back up electronic systems. “Did people not get any lessons learned from 2016?” Schneider said. “It’s really an odd time to be doing this.”

National: GAO again warns of risks in 2020 census | Anoushka Deshmukh/FCW

When the Government Accountability Office labeled the 2020 census as a high-risk government program in February 2017, the Census Bureau planned to address many of its challenges by re-engineering the census infrastructure and relying on new time and money-saving applications. Now, a July 16 GAO report details three primary concerns the watchdog agency has with the Bureau’s tech-based approach: untested innovations, implementation of IT systems and cybersecurity risks. The Bureau plans to use online census forms, which it expects will not only reduce costs but also increase accessibility and efficiency. Other innovations include re-engineering field operations, using administrative records and verifying addresses in-office. While these innovations show promise, they lack proper testing, GAO said, which raises the possibility of unexpected risks. The 2020 census will rely heavily on IT systems, which also need development and in-depth testing to confirm they function properly. To ensure adequate time for these tasks, the Census Bureau revised its systems development and testing schedule in October 2018, but according to GAO, “the Bureau is at risk of not meeting near-term IT system development and testing schedule milestones for five upcoming 2020 Census operational deliveries.”

National: No. 2 U.S. intelligence official talks about how U.S. is preparing for 2020 election threats | Olivia Gazis/CBS News

The U.S. intelligence community is preparing to confront a novel set of challenges related to the upcoming 2020 presidential elections amid proliferating disinformation threats – in part by boosting the amount of information it shares publicly, according to the number two intelligence official. “We have no expectation that, in 2020, [adversaries] will stay with the approach that they had in 2018,” said Principal National Intelligence Deputy Director Sue Gordon, who serves as deputy to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. “So, I think we already have raised our vision.” In an interview with Intelligence Matters host and CBS News senior national security contributor Michael Morell, Gordon, a career intelligence official who spent 27 years at the CIA before being nominated to her current post by President Trump in 2017, said foreign adversaries’ efforts to interfere with the country’s election security potentially pose a near-existential threat. “I can think of no greater threat to America than actions that would make us not believe in ourselves,” she said. “That is, national interests of our adversaries using information in order to sow seeds of division … or make people believe their votes don’t count, or position tools in our infrastructure” to otherwise affect the integrity of voting processes.

National: Intrusion monitors for election security are going virtual | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

As interest in cybersecurity swells among election officials, a small group of states has begun experimenting with a virtualized network-intrusion system that until recently had only been available in the form of a physical device. Typically, the Albert system, which is designed and distributed by the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, consists of single-unit physical servers outfitted with the organization’s open-source software that detects anomalous and malicious network activity. But five states and territories, led by Nebraska, have started using Albert sensors that run on a virtual server to detect attempted intrusions of their voter registration databases. The software-based version of the Albert system is a product of collaboration between the participating states, which have asked to remain anonymous; Election Systems & Software, which produces the voter registration system used by Nebraska and the others; and CIS, which operates the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the federally funded entity through which state officials, local officials and the U.S. Department of Homeland security exchange alerts about election security.

Alabama: Report says aging voting machines a concern in Alabama | Mike Cason/al.com

A report published Thursday on election security says states need more federal money to safeguard elections from outside threats. It says Alabama election officials cited a need to replace voting machines used in most counties that are more than a decade old and to establish a “cyber navigator program” to help local officials protect their systems. “Defending Elections: Federal Funding Needs for State Election Security,” attached at the end of this article, outlines how Alabama and five other states are using their shares of $380 million Congress provided to states for election security last year. Alabama’s allocation was $6.5 million, including the required 5 percent state match. The report was written by the Brennan Center for Justice; R Street; Pitt Cyber, the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security; and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The report said Russian hackers penetrated computer networks in two counties in Florida in 2016 by obtaining information from a software vendor. A gap opened by the same vendor might have allowed hackers to tamper with voter rolls in North Carolina, the report says. “Efforts like these undermine faith in our democratic system, and steps must be taken to prevent them from occurring again,” the report says.

Florida: 2020 election: Democrats man up for recount; GOP looks to boost voter ranks | Jennifer Jia/The Palm Beach Post

Brandon Peters, the state party’s voter protection program director, says he told Democratic activists at the state party’s Leadership Blue 2019 meeting in June that they should assume another recount will occur in 2020. Election Day in November 2020 is still more than a year away, but Florida Democrats are already lining up their poll watching, legal and — just in case — recount teams while state Republicans look to drive registrations higher. This past week, a Florida Democratic Party mass email was sent to potential volunteers calling on them to “protect the vote in Florida in 2020.” It added: “Because the GOP will stop at nothing to re-elect Donald Trump next year, it’s important for us to build our roster early.” Brandon Peters, the state party’s voter protection program director, says he told Democratic activists at the state party’s Leadership Blue 2019 meeting in June that they should assume another recount will occur in 2020. “We are going to be prepared,” Peters said. He hopes to recruit as many as 15,000 lawyers and volunteers by July of next year. Peters created a GoFundMe page in January to raise money needed to cover the costs of the effort. Fifty-two donors surpassed the post’s $2,500 goal. The funds will go toward hiring, training and equipping voter protection teams in Florida and Georgia.

Iowa: Iowa will keep voter registration system for 2020 elections | Ryan J. Foley/Associated Press

Iowa’s 14-year-old voter registration system will live to see another presidential election. The Iowa Secretary of State’s office confirmed Thursday that a long-discussed plan to replace the I-Voters database will not be completed before the 2020 elections.  Spokesman Kevin Hall said the office remains in the information-gathering phase of the project, which was formally launched more than a year ago. He said the state plans to solicit information from potential vendors soon and to later move forward with a bidding process. “This is a big project and we owe it to the voters of Iowa to build it responsibly with the future of elections and security in mind,” he said. The project is expected to cost $7 million and the office doesn’t yet have all that funding, he added. Russian hackers tried to infiltrate Iowa’s elections system in 2016 but were not successful. Current and former state officials say they have confidence in the security of the I-Voters system and that they’ve taken steps to prevent intrusions, including two-factor authentication and cybersecurity training for users in all of Iowa’s 99 counties. Built in 2005 and launched the next year, the system has been upgraded numerous times and contains data on Iowa’s roughly 2 million registered voters.

Pennsylvania: Elections experts say cybersecurity threats demand federal funding | Deb Erdley/Tribune-Review

Unfunded cybersecurity needs are leaving state and local election officials to stand on the front lines of threats from sophisticated international interests, a new report asserts. “Defending Elections,” a report from the Brennan Center for Justice, highlights growing concerns that myriad unmet security needs pose a threat to fair elections. Christopher R. Deluzio, policy director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, was among five researchers who collaborated on the report. He said a close look at efforts under way in six states — Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania — underscored the challenges elections officials face, from the need to purchase new voting machines that will create a paper record, to developing systems for post-election audits, addressing emerging cyber vulnerabilities and upgrading voter registration systems. Part of the problem is the cost of underwriting new voting machines as states and counties struggle to meet the timeline to have systems with paper backups in place in time for the 2020 presidential primaries. In Pennsylvania, where voting machines are purchased at the county level, Deluzio said the $14 million federal grant that was doled out to counties will finance only about 10% to 12% of the estimated $150 million needed to replace voting machines across the state.

West Virginia: Warner Calls Cyberattack a Warning for Election Cybersecurity | Steven Allen Adams/The Intelligencer

A recent ransomware attack on government computer systems in Harrison County did not affect voter registration systems or other counties, and the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office is preparing counties for other cyber-attacks leading to the 2020 election. Secretary of State Mac Warner was joined by his staff and county clerks from the region Wednesday at the secretary’s North Central Business Hub in Clarksburg. On June 13, county databases were victims of a ransomware attack, whereby computer services are locked out until a ransom is paid. Offices affected included the prosecuting attorney, the county assessor and the clerk’s office. Ransomware attacks can often happen when someone clicks a phishing link, which allows bad actors access to the computer system. “Everyone is susceptible to this individually, in businesses, in government, and so on,” Warner said. “It’s important to know what we’re doing in West Virginia to stay ahead of this trend and what we’re doing to train folks.” Harrison County Clerk Susan Thomas said the cyber-attack only affected the office’s online access to vital records, estate and probate documents, and tax records. The records are still available for view at the clerk’s office, though re-creating the online database could take years. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of West Virginia are investigating the attack.

India: Ahead of state elections, Congress looks to amp up push for paper ballots | Aurangzeb Naqshbandi/Hindustan Times

The Congress is likely to convene a meeting of opposition parties after the budget session of Parliament ends to discuss their future course of action on the issue of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) that some say are susceptible to manipulation. After suffering a heavy defeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, in which it managed to win only 52 seats in the 543-member House, the party has decided to escalate its demand for the restoration of ballot papers to replace electronic voting in future elections. According to a Congress functionary, a group of party leaders recently met United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi and senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who has stepped down as president over the electoral rout, and asked them to push the demand in a big way. The functionary, who requested anonymity, said the party had not only received feedback from the ground but is “convinced” that “EVMs were manipulated” in the national elections, in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 303 seats. Past protests by opposition parties that EVMs were vulnerable to tampering have failed to convince the Election Commission (EC), which has rejected the allegations. The Supreme Court in April raised the physical counting of Electronic Voting Machines using a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (EVM-VVPATs) in constituencies from one to five on a plea by opposition parties, but in May turned down a petition for an increase in random checks to at least 50% EVMs.

Japan: Internal affairs ministry to test online voting for overseas citizens | The Japan Times

The internal affairs ministry will test online voting for Japanese citizens living abroad in an effort to raise voter turnout among such people in elections. The ministry will conduct the test after Sunday’s House of Councilors election with a goal of introducing it as early as the next Upper House poll in 2022, officials said. Eligible voters will be able to enter the voting page using electronic devices by verifying their identity through registered My Number identification cards. To protect privacy, voting data will be sent encrypted to Japan, and personal information attached to the data will be deleted when votes are counted. Voting data left on voter devices will also be deleted. An expert panel set up by the ministry proposed the introduction of online voting in August last year to address low voter turnout, at around 20 percent, among Japanese citizens overseas. The low rates are believed to reflect a shorter voting period due to the need to send votes to Japan as well as the need to go to diplomatic missions where polling stations are set up.

National: States need more federal funds to secure elections: report | Maggie Miller/The Hill

States are in need of further funding from the federal government to fully secure elections, a report published Thursday found, citing six states as examples. The report was compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, the R Street Institute, the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. It spotlights Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. “Elections are the pillar of American democracy, and, as we saw in 2016 and 2018, foreign governments will continue to target them,” the authors wrote in the report. “States cannot counter these adversaries alone, nor should they have to. But at a time when free and fair elections are increasingly under attack, they can, with additional federal funding, safeguard them.” Four of the states reported that future federal funds are needed to replace “legacy” or older voting equipment that have cyber vulnerabilities, while several other states cited the need for funding to train election officials in cybersecurity.

National: Senate passes bill making hacking voting systems a federal crime | Jordain Carney/The Hill

The Senate passed legislation on Wednesday night that would make it a federal crime to hack into any voting systems used in a federal election. The bill, known as the Defending the Integrity of Voting Systems Act, passed the chamber on Wednesday night by unanimous consent, which requires the sign off of every senator. It would allow the Justice Department to pursue federal charges against anyone who hacks voting systems used in federal elections under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced the legislation earlier this year and it cleared the Judiciary Committee in May. “Our legislation to protect voting machines will better equip the Department of Justice to fight back against hackers that intend to interfere with our election,” Blumenthal said when the bill was introduced.