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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is demanding answers from the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) as to how the federal agency plans to secure election equipment amid reports that most machines depend on software that will soon be out-of-date and vulnerable to cyber attacks. In a letter dated July 12 that was released on Monday, Wyden asked EAC Chairwoman Christy McCormick how the agency plans to address this “looming cybersecurity crisis.” “Intelligence officials have made it clear that Russian hackers targeted our elections in 2016, and that they expect similar threats in 2020,” Wyden wrote. “The continued use of out-of-date software on voting machines and the computers used to administer elections lays out the red carpet for foreign hackers. This is unacceptable.” The Associated Press recently reported that the majority of U.S. counties use election management systems that run on Windows 7, an outdated operating system that Microsoft will stop updating in January. The systems are responsible for programming voting machines and tallying votes. Wyden focused his questions on whether products created by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), one of the major U.S. voting equipment manufacturers, would be decertified by the EAC prior to the 2020 elections. According to EAC documentation, the equipment uses Windows 7. Wyden gave McCormick a July 26 deadline to respond to his questions.

National: Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines | Ken Dilanian/NBC

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far this election cycle. The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to “enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting.” The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election. The system uses an encrypted tracking code to allow a voter to verify that his or her vote has been recorded and has not been tampered with, Microsoft said in a blog post. Its announcement was timed to coincide with the Aspen Security Forum, an annual conference of current and former intelligence, defense and homeland security officials that kicks off Wednesday in Aspen, Colorado — co-sponsored by Microsoft and others. NBC News is a media partner of the forum. Edward Perez, an election security expert with the independent Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Microsoft’s move signals that voting systems, long a technology backwater, are finally receiving attention from the county’s leading technical minds.

National: How Julian Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election meddling | Marshall Cohen, Kay Guerrero and Arturo Torres/CNN

New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy. The surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command center and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. Despite being confined to the embassy while seeking safe passage to Ecuador, Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical moments, frequently for hours at a time. He also acquired powerful new computing and network hardware to facilitate data transfers just weeks before WikiLeaks received hacked materials from Russian operatives. These stunning details come from hundreds of surveillance reports compiled for the Ecuadorian government by UC Global, a private Spanish security company, and obtained by CNN. They chronicle Assange’s movements and provide an unprecedented window into his life at the embassy. They also add a new dimension to the Mueller report, which cataloged how WikiLeaks helped the Russians undermine the US election. An Ecuadorian intelligence official told CNN that the surveillance reports are authentic.

National: Multiple Bills Seek To Secure Elections: Will They Do It? | Taylor Armerding/Forbes

If the security of voting systems in the next election will be a function of the amount of legislation on the topic now pending in Congress, we’ve got nothing to worry about in November 2020. There is a growing pile of bills in both the House and Senate, most featuring several to dozens of cosponsors—sometimes even from both parties—accompanied by press releases with made-to-order endorsements from congressional leaders, advocacy groups and cybersecurity experts. They all call for securing U.S. elections and “protecting our democracy.” But, of course, the number of bills doesn’t matter. It’s about quality, not quantity. The things that do matter are what gets enacted into law and whether its mandates get done or get watered down. And that, as the predictable cliché goes, remains to be seen.

National: Alarm sounds over census cybersecurity concerns | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Lawmakers are raising concerns that the upcoming 2020 census, which people are expected to fill out primarily online for the first time, is opening the door to potential cyber vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities were in the spotlight on Capitol Hill on Tuesday as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing to examine the security of the census, which residents will be able to complete online, over the phone or on paper. The hearing featured testimony from top officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has added the Census Bureau to its list of “high risk programs” due to cybersecurity and information technology shortfalls. “Although the Bureau has taken initial steps to address risk, additional actions are needed as these risks could adversely impact the cost, quality, schedule, and security of the enumeration,” Nick Marinos, the director of Information Technology and Cybersecurity at GAO, and Robert Goldenkoff, the director of Strategic Issues at GAO, said in their written testimony. Concerns center around the security of personal data involved in the census, and around securing systems against threats from foreign nations. The anxiety echoes some of the worry surrounding security against cyberattacks from foreign actors during the upcoming presidential election.

National: Secretaries of state plead for more money for election security | Mark Albert/KOCO

The nation’s chief elections officials are pleading for more money from the federal government to shore up the security of crucial voting systems before the presidential contest in 2020, even as such aid appears dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate. Interviews with 10 secretaries of state, conducted by the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit at the annual summer conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State held this year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, found unanimity across party lines. When asked whether their states needed more money for election security, one secretary after another answered in the affirmative. “Absolutely,” responded Pennsylvania Acting Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat. “Absolutely,” seconded Laurel Lee, Florida’s Secretary of State, a member of the Republican party. “Look, we absolutely need more money,” Democrat Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, said. “We can always use more money for election security,” said Mac Warner, a Republican who serves as secretary of state in Virginia. But despite the landslide of bipartisan requests, $600 million in additional funding is stuck in the Senate after passing the House last month on a nearly party-line vote.

Georgia: Unclassified DHS memo outlined threats to Georgia elections | Mark Niesse/Atlanta Journal Constitution

The potential for tampering in Georgia’s elections last fall prompted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to warn election officials to be on guard against foreign interference. A recently released DHS memo, titled “A Georgia Perspective on Threats to the 2018 U.S. Elections,” listed concerns about hacking, misinformation spread through social media and disruptions to election infrastructure.The federal advice came as attorneys for state election officials argued in court documents that fears of hacking and vote miscounting were little more than “a theoretical possibility.”Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office said Monday that cybersecurity has been an ongoing priority since well before the 2018 elections.“This memo is standard information sharing and shows what all levels of government are doing to protect our elections,” said spokeswoman Tess Hammock. “DHS prepared a similar memo for every state. There is no evidence of any successful attempts to interfere in Georgia’s elections.”The unclassified DHS document became public Wednesday when it was included as an exhibit in an ongoing lawsuit seeking to prevent the continued use of electronic voting machines. “Foreign governments may engage in cyber operations targeting the election infrastructure and political organization in Georgia and engage in influence operations that aim to interfere with the 2018 U.S. elections,” according to the Oct. 2, 2018, document prepared by the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis Field Operations Division for the Southeast Region. The two-page memo didn’t specify who might have attempted to tamper with Georgia’s elections, but it said their goals could have been “to disrupt political processes, sway public opinion, or to undermine certain political organizations.”

Pennsylvania: Citing election security, advocates seek to force Pennsylvania to reexamine new voting machines | Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

Organized by election-security advocates, 200 Pennsylvania voters filed a petition Tuesday seeking to force the Pennsylvania Department of State to reconsider its approval of a touchscreen voting machine selected by Philadelphia and other counties. Those machines, the ExpressVote XL from election mega-vendor Election Systems & Software (ES&S), have security flaws and do not comply with the state Election Code, the voters say in their petition submitted by certified mail and email Tuesday. It was signed by voters from Allegheny, Bucks, Delaware, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia, and Westmoreland Counties. The law gives voters authority to trigger a new state review of previously certified electronic voting machines. The petitioners lay out a number of concerns, including the possibility of attackers’ altering votes; ballot secrecy being violated by comparing the chronological stack of ballots to poll books; poll workers inadvertently seeing voters’ choices while helping them; and lack of accessibility for voters with disabilities. They also point to requirements in the Election Code that they say the machine does not meet, such as not using colored paper to distinguish between political parties during a primary election. An ES&S spokesperson rejected those contentions, saying the ExpressVote XL protects voters’ privacy, is accessible for voters with disabilities, and does not allow manipulation of ballots after they are cast.

South Carolina: Does South Carolina’s new polling system get a vote of confidence? | Heath Ellison/The Daniel Island News

South Carolina will implement a new voting system starting January 1, 2020. The new method will be a mixture of the new and old by offering voters a touchscreen interface to make their choices, but will add “the security of a paper ballot,” according to the South Carolina State Election Commission. Voters will make their decision with the touchscreen and the new machine will print out a paper ballot. Individuals can review the ballot to assure their votes are correct, then they will enter them into the machine. Votes will be scanned and tallied when the paper is securely put in the ballot box. The paper ballots will be saved “for auditing and verification of results,” the Commission said. “I think there will be a learning curve,” said Berkeley County Voter Registration and Elections Director Adam Hammons. “I think it will continue to allow voters to access their ballot in the way that they’re used to.” Hammons added that he believes the new system will be a good change for the county.

Washington: State’s new voting system concerns county elections officials | Aaron Kunkler/Kent Reporter

County election officials are raising concerns about the new Washington state voting system ahead of the Aug. 6 primary election while state officials say they have confidence in it. The new voting system, VoteWA, is a $9.5 million program that came online last May and is meant to unify all 39 county voting systems in the state into a single entity. This will allow greater security and more easily facilitate same-day voter registration, said Washington’s Secretary of State Kim Wyman, who has advocated for the program. “I want people to know that our system is secure and that our counties are going to be ready for the August primary and the November general elections,” Wyman said. Several issues have made King County Elections officials less confident. The state shut down the old voting system on May 24 and spent several days transferring voter data to VoteWA. Following this, counties double-checked the new data with their previous voter records to ensure accuracy, which meant they were not able to register new voters in the system until June 9. In King County, this led to a backlog of 16,000 voters, said King County Elections director Julie Wise during a July 10 meeting of the county’s Regional Policy Committee. “There was a rush to get this system implemented, and it’s not ready to go,” Wise said. “I know that that’s concerning, and that it causes alarm for people, but I do want to say we are working diligently.”

Lithuania: Meet the Elves, Lithuania’s digital citizen army confronting Russian trolls | Kim Sengupta/The Independent

When the dark acts of the trolls became particularly harmful, the Elves felt they had no choice but to get together and fight back, and the fierce battle which then began has since been waged with no sign of ending. Industrial-scale spreading of disinformation; manipulating elections; undermining democratic institutions; orchestrating racial and sectarian strife have become potent weapons of modern hybrid warfare. Lithuania is along the frontline in this conflict between Russia and the west. The European Union’s Cyber Rapid Response Force has its headquarters in the country and the region, with the other Baltic states, is a focal point for Nato strategy. Thus, it is not surprising that it was in Lithuania that the citizens’ online army of the elves started five years ago to take on the Russian trolls. It now has an international force of thousands of volunteers. The vast majority of them are based down the length of Russia’s border from the Nordic states to Armenia. But there is also rising interest from countries in the west, including Britain, as the arena of the internet warriors continues to spread.

Russia: Moscow Protesters Call Local Elections Rigged | Associated Press

Russian opposition leaders led a rally in Moscow of about 1,000 people Sunday to protest the city election commission’s decision that will keep several opposition candidates off the ballot in a local election. The unsanctioned rally was billed as a meeting between opposition leaders and voters after the Moscow election commission rejected signatures needed to qualify the candidates for the September city parliament election. Demonstrators chanted “We are the authority here!” and “Putin is a thief.” Police made no effort to intervene until later in the evening, after the protest crowd had largely dispersed and opposition leaders called for the remaining participants to stage an overnight sit-in at the election commission. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was not seen at the protest. The demonstration was led, in various stages, by opposition figures Dmitry Gudkov, Ilya Yashin and Lyubov Sobol. “We were collecting the signatures under rain and in the heat,” Gudkov said. “And you know what (the election commission) told us yesterday? They told us that our signatures are fake. Many of the people who gave me their signatures are here today. Friends, do you agree?” The crowd responded: “No!”

National: Here’s an overlooked election cybersecurity danger: outdated software | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

There’s a big hacking danger facing the 2020 election that’s so far been overlooked: software so old that companies aren’t updating it anymore. The “vast majority” of the nation’s 10,000 election jurisdictions rely on Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, which was introduced in 2009 and will reach the end of its technological life span in January, according to a report this weekend from the Associated Press’s Tami Abdollah. And some of those jurisdictions are relying on software that’s even older. That means those systems — which are running in numerous swing states’ election systems — won’t get automatically updated to protect against newfound computer bugs, leaving the systems far more vulnerable to hackers who exploit those bugs, Abdollah reports. The report highlights yet another way in which elections remain vulnerable to hacking despite calls for vastly improved election cybersecurity after the 2016 contest was upended by Russian hacking and disinformation operations — and amid warnings from Intelligence officials that Russia and other U.S. adversaries want to similarly compromise the 2020 contest. The vulnerable software is deployed on systems to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts, per the AP. It also demonstrates how many election cybersecurity challenges evade easy fixes.

National: New election systems use vulnerable software | Tami Abdollah/Associated Press

New election systems use vulnerable software | Tami Abdollah/Associated Press

National: Who’s behind voting-machine makers? Money of unclear origins | Emery P. Dalesio/Associated Press

The voting-machine makers that aim to sell their systems in North Carolina are largely owned by private equity firms that don’t disclose their investors. The companies didn’t want the public to know even that much. North Carolina’s statewide elections board demanded the machine-makers’ ownership information last month after special counsel Robert Mueller’s April report into Russian efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election. Their concerns about potential foreign interference have grown since Maryland officials learned last year that a company maintaining that state’s election infrastructure did not disclose its financing by a venture fund whose largest investor is a Russian oligarch. The private-equity backers of the three voting systems vendors seeking approval to sell to county elections boards in North Carolina told The Associated Press they’re controlled by U.S. citizens. They claimed they have no ties to foreign oligarchs or other nefarious persons facing financial sanctions by Washington. But they didn’t provide information about the sources of the money they invest. And they asked the board not to share what they did disclose with the public. The elections board released the companies’ responses — as required by law — under a public records request from The AP. Election security watchdogs remain frustrated.

National: Thousands of election systems running software that will soon be outdated: report | Tal Axelrod/The Hill

The vast majority of the nation’s 10,000 election jurisdictions are using an operating system that will soon be outdated, according to an Associated Press analysis. Those jurisdictions using Windows 7 or an older operating system to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts will reach its “end of life” on Jan. 14 — meaning Microsoft will no longer provide technical support or produce “patches” to deal with vulnerabilities that hackers could possibly exploit. Microsoft told the AP in a statement Friday that it would offer continued Windows 7 security updates for a fee through 2023. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill. Critics told the AP that the obsolescence was an example of what happens when private companies determine the security level of election systems without federal guidelines. Vendors defended themselves, saying they’ve been making consistent improvements on security, but state officials said they were wary of federal involvement in state and local races.

National: Who Will Clean Up America’s Voter Rolls? | Mark Hemingway/RealClearPolitics

Los Angeles County has too many voters. An estimated 1.6 million, according to the latest calculations – which is roughly the population of Philadelphia. That’s the difference between the number of people on the county’s voter rolls and the actual number of voting age residents. This means that L.A. is in violation of federal law, which seeks to limit fraud by requiring basic voter list maintenance to make sure that people who have died, moved, or are otherwise ineligible to vote aren’t still on the rolls. Los Angeles County has made only minimal efforts to clean up its voter rolls for decades. It began sending notices to those 1.6 million people last month to settle a lawsuit brought by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch. Los Angeles County may be California’s worst offender, but 10 of the state’s 58 counties also have registration rates exceeding 100% of the voting age population. In fact, the voter registration rate for the entire state of California is 101%. And the Golden State isn’t alone. Eight states, as well as the District of Columbia, have total voter registration tallies exceeding 100%, and in total, 38 states have counties where voter registration rates exceed 100%. Another state that stands out is Kentucky, where the voter registration rate in 48 of its 120 counties exceeded 100% last year. About 15% of America’s counties where there is reliable voter data – that is, over 400 counties out of 2,800 – have voter registration rates over 100%.

Florida: Here’s (more) evidence Bill Nelson suffered from bad ballot design in 2018 | Langston Taylor/Tampa Bay Times

Evidence continues to mount that shows former U.S. Senator Bill Nelson’s race for re-election in 2018 was hampered by a ballot design quirk. Florida has already enacted a law that would standardize ballots to avoid a repeat of what happened in part of heavily-Democratic Broward County: a ballot design that made the Senate race “easy to overlook.” It was immediately clear after the Nov. 6 election that far more voters than expected were leaving the Senate box blank. Many of those voters supported other Democrats, like the losing candidate for Governor, Andrew Gillum. In a new academic paper presented Thursday at the Election Sciences, Reform, & Administration Conference, two researchers looked beyond vote totals, drilling down to the individual ballot level. What they found was this: In Broward County, voters who skipped the Senate race likely did so by accident, rather than purposely avoiding the race. Broward County ballots put voting instructions in the first column, rather than stripped across the top. That design pushed the Senate race far down the page, isolating it from other marquee contests.

Idaho: Error left tax-paying Boise residents off city voter rolls | Hayley Harding/Idaho Statesman

Blue Valley Mobile Home Park, a community of about 900 people in Boise’s far southeast corner, was annexed into the city in 2014. But when it came to city elections, Blue Valley voters were disenfranchised. A clerical error kept about 150 voters off the city voting rolls in the 2015 city election and 190 in the 2017 election, according to county Elections Director, even though property owners were paying city taxes by then. Voters in Blue Valley were added to city rolls in June, Levine said Wednesday, after Blue Valley residents realized what had happened and complained. He said officials are looking into how the problem occurred and who is responsible. One resident, Jennifer Wiley, told the Statesman that she went to her polling place to vote in the 2015 mayoral race just to be turned away. An Idaho Statesman reporter who reviewed voting rolls was unable to find a single Blue Valley address on more than a hundred pages of voting rolls for November city elections in those years — the first two elections in which Blue Valley residents should have been able to vote. Blue Valley, along with other homes near the neighborhood, is assigned to Precinct 1803 in Ada County. When Wiley got to her polling place, poll workers told her she wasn’t eligible to vote in the city election.

Illinois: Audit: State’s technology department full of waste, unequipped to deal with disaster | Jerry Nowicki/Northwest Herald

In its first two years of existence, the state’s lead technology agency was not equipped to handle technology disasters, maintained servers and computers with inadequate or nonexistent anti-virus protection, failed to implement cybersecurity controls, and did not properly document purchases or property inventory, according to areport from the Illinois Auditor General’s office. The audit of the Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology — a state agency created in January 2016 through an executive order signed by former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner — also found that an effort to consolidate financial, human capital and procurement functions for all state agencies will cost $150 million more than initially estimated over a six-year implementation period. The Enterprise Resource Planning System, launched during former Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration and overseen by the Illinois Department of Central Management Services before being taken over by DOIT, will cost just under $400 million by 2021, up from an initial estimate of $250 million. These findings were among 30 listed in Auditor General Frank Mautino’s report for fiscal years 2017 and 2018, the first two years of operation for the department created to “deliver best-in-class innovation and technology to client agencies.” Jennifer Schultz, a spokeswoman for DOIT, said failure to execute the requirements of the executive order was due to a number of factors, including state government dysfunction.

North Carolina: New elections loom without decision on voting machines | Travis Fain/WRAL

Voters in large swaths of North Carolina may use touchscreen voting equipment again for the 2020 presidential elections, despite the legislature voting in 2013 to phase out these machines in favor of paper ballots. Legislation to delay that for a third time in the last 6 years is pending at the General Assembly, and the state’s elections director has backed the delay as the State Board of Elections weighs what new machines to sign off on. Separate legislation is also moving through the General Assembly to require all the companies that want to sell voting machines in North Carolina to put up a $17 million bond, a change that at least one competing vendor sees as a way to discourage competition, and the current vendor says is only fair. Meanwhile the federal government is probing poll books used in Durham in the 2016 elections for evidence of foreign tampering. State elections officials are also doing a deeper dive on the three companies hoping to sell voting machines to local boards of election, probing whether any have foreign ownership. State officials asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to assist with that and report back on any potentially troubling ties, State Board member Stella Anderson said Friday. “I doubt (they find anything), but you never know,” Anderson said.

Canada: Federal election panel may have tough call | Jim Vibert/The Chronicle Herald

Should malign actors – foreign, domestic, or indeterminate – mess with Canada’s election this fall, a gathering of five senior federal bureaucrats will decide whether the action constitutes a threat to our otherwise “free and fair” election. If it does, they’ll let us know. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless the process is as cumbersome as the label pinned on it. In that case, the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, or CEIPP (seep?), would alert us to election skullduggery sometime after the next Parliament is sworn in. The five members of the CEIPP panel are the clerk of the Privy Council, the prime minister’s national security and intelligence adviser, and the deputy ministers of Justice, Public Safety, and Foreign Affairs. This high-powered group will draw information from Canada’s intelligence agencies who are, we’re told, hard at work defending us from unseen malevolence, and spying on environmental activists. Actually, we weren’t told that bit about spying on environmentalists. We learned that this week after a federal court unsealed a raft of documents that showed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service traded intel about environmentalists with oil companies. That has little to do with free and fair elections, but it raises troubling questions about the power imbalance that makes a mockery of democracy itself. But I digress.

India: Revert to ballot papers, demand activists | Manan Kumar/DNA

A large number of civil rights groups including National Alliance for People’s Movement (NAPM) and Nation for Farmers (NFF) along with several political parties have decided to launch a nationwide people’s movement on August 9 to reject Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and bring back paper ballot in elections. “We will be starting it on the eve of Quit India movement with the slogan “EVM Bharat Chhodo, Ballot Paper Vapis Lao,” said Dr. Sunilam, convenor of NAPM. The two-day meeting participated by representatives of political parties discussed the shocking 2019 elections results that paled even the election results of 1977 when anger was at its height against the Indira Gandhi government.

Philippines: Smartmatic still wants to be part of Philippine elections | Ralf Rivas/Rappler

Technology company Smartmatic remains optimistic that it will still be the government’s pick to be the provider of vote-counting machines (VCMs) for succeeding elections, despite President Rodrigo Duterte’s view that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) must end ties with them. Machines that reject ballots, transmission delays, and over-voting which eventually led to votes not being counted were just some of the problems encountered during the May 2019 elections. The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the Comelec hosted a technology fair on Monday, July 15, to scout for possible alternatives to Smartmatic’s system. Despite the President’s criticism, Smartmatic showed up and presented hardware such as a direct recording electronic voting machine or touchscreen.

National: Election security briefings failed to satisfy congressional critics | Tim Starks/Politico

House members and senators emerged from two election security briefings by top Trump administration officials Wednesday with plenty of questions. “There is real interest on the part of members of Congress to know who is in charge or what are the operating procedures for the process to move forward,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “And the answers were not as clear as they need to be.” Some reportedly didn’t get answers about whether President Donald Trump himself has received a comprehensive briefing. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told MC that while he was impressed with the 2020 preparation thus far, more needs to be done. “One of the open questions is, what is the responsibility of the intelligence community to notify a campaign if they’re being victimized by a foreign adversary?” he said. As for the administration: “Today we shared with Congress how we continue to bring the full strength, capabilities, and expertise of our departments and agencies to identity and defend against threats to the United States,” agency officials involved in the briefing said in a joint statement. “Just like our successful, whole-of-government approach to securing the 2018 elections, we will work together with our Federal, state, local and private sector partners as well as our foreign allies to protect the 2020 elections and maintain transparency with the American public about our efforts.”

National: As Feds struggle, states create their own anti-election propaganda programs | Kevin Collier/CNN

As the 2020 presidential campaign heats up, individual states are ramping up education efforts to counter the threat posed by foreign disinformation campaigns to US elections. A lack of action at the federal level has prompted many states to craft their own programs designed to counter foreign efforts to undermine American democracy and educate the next generation of voters in schools. “It harms our democratic process when disinformation is at any point fed to voters in our democratic process,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CNN. “So I do think as secretaries of state, we have a responsibility to it take to the people.” Declassified intelligence reports on Russian meddling, by design, refuse to analyze the effectiveness of American opinion. And though most of Russia’s known propaganda efforts in the 2016 election were unsophisticated — armies of trolls with often strongly partisan opinions on polarizing subjects — they were effective enough to be widely quoted in the media and cited by a number of political figures, including Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, and Michael Flynn, who went on to briefly serve as Trump’s national security adviser and was later charged and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations with Russia’s ambassador.

National: Voting Machine Makers Claim The Names Of The Entities That Own Them Are Trade Secrets | Tim Cushing/Techdirt

Recently, the North Carolina State Board of Elections asked suppliers of electronic voting machines a simple question: who owns you? (h/t Annemarie Bridy) On June 14, 2019, the State Board of Elections requested that your companies disclose any owners or shareholders with a 5% or greater interest or share in each of the vendor’s company, any subsidiary company, of the vendor, and the vendor’s parent company. This seems like very basic information — information the Board should know and should be able to pass on to the general public. After all, these are the makers of devices used by the public while electing their representatives. They should know who’s running these companies and who their majority stakeholders are. If something goes wrong (and something always does), they should know who’s ultimately responsible for the latest debacle. It’s not like the state was asking the manufacturers to cough up code and machine schematics. All it wanted to know is the people behind the company nameplates. But the responses the board received indicate voting system manufacturers believe releasing any info about their companies’ compositions will somehow compromise their market advantage. Hart Intercivic said letting the public know that the company is owned by H.I.G. Hart, LLC and Gregg L. Burt is a fact that would devalue the company if it were made public. Hart InterCivic, a corporation that derives independent actual value from this information not being generally known or readily ascertainable and makes reasonable efforts to maintain the secrecy of this information, requests that it be designated as a trade secret pursuant to G.S. § 132-1.2(1)d. and G.S. § 66-152(3).

National: Disabled voters left behind in push to amp up 2020 security, advocates say | Jordan Wilkie/The Guardian

Russian attacks on American democracy in 2016, carried out over the internet, have triggered a national debate over the use of technology in the United States’ upcoming 2020 elections. But some of the best ways to beef up the security of the voting process and fight off future cyber-attacks could have an unintended consequence: limiting access to the vote for people with disabilities. Voting on hand-marked paper ballots – which by definition can’t be hacked – combined with robust audits of how the elections were carried out and how the votes were counted is widely seen as the most secure way to run an election. Cybersecurity experts want hand-marked paper ballot systems, but disability rights advocates want voting machines to be used for all voters, as they are best for disabled access. The two groups have been butting heads over this since the Help America Vote Act (Hava) of 2002, which gave states $3.9bn to buy new voting technology and required every polling place have at least one accessible voting machine. Rather than operate parallel systems – and since it was on the federal dime – many county and state governments decided to purchase voting machines to be used by all voters – something now seen as a security weakness.

National: FEC allow scampaigns to accept discounted cybersecurity services | Maggie Miller/The Hill

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Thursday approved a request from a private company to provide discounted cybersecurity services to political campaigns, saying it did not violate campaign finance rules. The decision came in response to a request from Area 1 Security, a California-based company, to offer cybersecurity services to federal political candidates and political committees at discounted rates. The FEC, which has jurisdiction over campaign finance for presidential and congressional elections, decided the arrangement did not violate campaign contribution rules because the company offers similar discounted services to nonpolitical clients as well. The decision allows the company to sell anti-phishing services to federal candidates and political committees for as little as $1,337 per year, according to the FEC. The agency wrote that “doing so would be in the ordinary course of Area 1’s business and on terms and conditions that apply to similarly situated non-political clients.”

National: Oh, lovely, a bipartisan election hack alert law bill for Mitch McConnell to feed into the shredder | Shaun Nichols/The Register