North Macedonia: Russia denies interfering in North Macedonia’s July 15 general election | Valentina Dimitrievska/bne IntelliNews
Accusations of Russian interference in North Macedonia’s July 15 snap general election are “absurd”, Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a news conference on July 23. Many anonymous audio recordings were revealed during the pre-election campaign, compromising politicians from both the ruling SDSM and the opposition VMRO-DPMNE. There were also a series of hacker attacks around election day, including against the State Election Commission (SEC) website. However, no official accusations have been levelled at Moscow in connection to the vote. Zakharova commented on the election in response to a journalist’s question, and accused Western politicians of hypocrisy and a “cynical use of double standards”. “It was not difficult to notice a series of video messages posted by senior Western politicians during the election campaign in North Macedonia that openly and persistently called on people to vote for one or another party. Against the background of this foreign interference, speculations about certain Russian influence are absolutely unfounded and completely absurd,” Zakharova said. The election resulted in a slim victory for the SDSM, which won only two more seats in the parliament than VMRO-DPMNE, making the formation of a new cabinet difficult.United Kingdom: ISC Attributes Cyber-Attacks and Election Interference to Russia | Dan Raywood/Infosecurity Magazine
Russia has been named as a “highly capable cyber-actor” by the UK government’s Intelligence and Security Committee. Claiming that “the UK is one of Russia’s top Western intelligence targets,” particularly given the UK’s firm stance against recent Russian aggression and the UK-led international response to the 2018 Salisbury attack, the ISC warned that Russia’s intelligence services are disproportionately large and powerful and are able to act without constraint. This has allowed a fusion between state, business and serious and organized crime making Russia an all-encompassing security threat. In terms of the cyber-threat, the ISC report stated that Russia employs organized crime groups to supplement its cyber-skills and carries out malicious cyber-activity in order to assert itself aggressively with democratic interference having “undertaken cyber pre-positioning on other countries’ Critical National Infrastructure.” The report claimed: “Given the immediate threat this poses to our national security, we are concerned that there is no clear coordination of the numerous organizations across the UK intelligence community working on this issue; this is reinforced by an unnecessarily complicated wiring diagram of responsibilities amongst Ministers.”Georgia: Anatomy of an Election ‘Meltdown’ in Georgia | Danny Hakim, Reid J. Epstein and Stephanie Saul/The New York Times
Last month, Daryl Marvin got his first taste of voting in Georgia. Mr. Marvin had previously lived in Connecticut, where voting was a brisk process measured in minutes. But on the day of the primary, June 9, he and his wife waited four hours to vote at Park Tavern, an Atlanta restaurant where more than 16,000 voters were consolidated into a single precinct. An electrical engineer by training, Mr. Marvin was baffled by what he saw when he finally got inside: a station with 15 to 20 touch screens on which to vote but only a single scanner to process the printed ballots. “The scanner was the choke point,” he said. “Nobody thought about it, and this is Operations Research 101. It’s not very difficult to figure it out.” Captured in drone footage, beamed across airwaves and internet, the interminable lines at Atlanta polling sites became an instant and indelible omen of voting breakdown in this pandemic-challenged presidential election year. Elections workers described a cascade of failures as they struggled to activate and operate Georgia’s new high-tech voting system. Next came a barrage of partisan blame-throwing: The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, accused the liberal-leaning Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, of botching the election, while Democratic leaders saw the fiasco as just the latest episode in Republicans’ yearslong effort to disenfranchise the state’s minority voters. Six weeks later, as the political calendar bends toward November and the presidential campaigns look to Georgia as a possible battleground, the faults in the state’s balky elections system remain largely unresolved. And it has become increasingly clear that what happened in June was a collective collapse.Verified Voting Blog: Verified Voting to Congress: Pass Funding Now
Voters should not have to choose between their health and their vote, and with a little more than 100 days before the election, Verified Voting continues to urge Congress to pass $3.6 billion in funding included in the HEROES Act for election officials to conduct safe and secure elections in November.
As yesterday’s Senate Rules Committee hearing on “2020 General Election Preparations” clearly demonstrated, officials desperately need resources to ensure the election proceeds safely and securely and this is true across the political spectrum.
Here are some snippets from the hearing [full video available here]:
“Already limited resources must be put to use, not just to ensure the safety and security of our democracy, but to ensure the health and safety of individual voters and election workers are not at risk,” said Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO), Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.
Senator Angus King (I-ME) highlighted the security risks of internet voting and evidence of foreign interference in the 2016 elections. He said, “I can assure you the Russians are going to try and are trying to interfere in the election of 2020… And the problem with this challenge that we face is… they don’t have to change votes. All they have to do is sow doubt. Doubt is the dagger in the heart of democracy.”
Senator Blunt agreed that having confidence in the election results is critically important. He said it is “the fabric of democracy and we have to be thinking about that all the time.”
Verified Voting offers recommendations that can be implemented to address the challenges of running a secure, verifiable election in the midst of a pandemic, but all of our recommendations require immediate resources and planning. Congress needs to act now – the clock is ticking for election officials to have enough time to expand mail voting and ensure safe in-person voting for all voters.
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