Vermont: House gives Secretary of State Condos full authority to expand mail-in voting | Kit Norton/VTDigger

The Vermont House gave preliminary approval Wednesday to give Secretary of State Jim Condos the unilateral authority to expand mail-in voting for the November general election because of the coronavirus epidemic. The move came after Condos and Gov. Phil Scott struggled to reach agreement. The lower chamber voted 106-31 by virtual voice vote in favor of S.348, which removes the need for the secretary of state and the governor to concur on emergency election protocol in 2020. “We are in the middle of a public health pandemic, and we should be doing everything in our power to keep people safe and that their vote be counted,” said House Majority Leader Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington. “It’s critical we move this bill forward again so we can ensure that we have safe and secure elections in Vermont,” Krowinski added.

West Virginia: The pandemic primary created challenges for election officials. Now, they’re preparing to repeat the process in November. | Politics | Lacie Pierson/Charleston Gazette Mail

Less than 24 hours after the polls closed for West Virginia’s 2020 primary election, Secretary of State Mac Warner said there were a lot of lessons learned and more work to do if officials are going to repeat the process in November amid the global coronavirus pandemic. Employees in county clerks’ offices throughout the state already had received approximately 217,885 absentee ballots as of Wednesday, and another 44,468 absentee ballots still were outstanding, according to the secretary of state’s website. County clerks and voter canvassing boards have plenty more work to do beyond waiting for the remaining absentee ballots to come back in, Warner said, but while that work is being completed, West Virginians and county clerks should be proud of their extra efforts to make this a “smooth and clean” election. “The election worked, but there are lessons to be learned from this,” Warner said. “I’m anxious to let the [county] clerks get through the canvassing process and talk to them about what worked, what didn’t work, what their recommendations are, should we get into this situation in November.”

Georgia: Voting machines and coronavirus force long lines on Georgia voters | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia’s primary quickly turned into an ordeal for voters who waited for hours Tuesday when it became clear officials were unprepared for an election on new voting computers during the coronavirus pandemic. Poll workers couldn’t get voting machines to work. Precincts opened late. Social-distancing requirements created long lines. Some voters gave up and went home. The primary was a major test of Georgia’s ability to run a highly anticipated election in a potential battleground state ahead of November’s presidential election, when more than twice as many voters are expected. Elections officials fell short. “What is going on in Georgia? We have been waiting for hours. This is ridiculous. This is unfair,” said 80-year-old Anita Heard, who waited for hours to cast her ballot at Cross Keys High School, where poll workers couldn’t start voting computers and ran out of provisional ballots. Problems have been building for weeks as precincts closed, poll workers quit and the primary was postponed because of the health danger posed by the coronavirus crisis. Some voters south of Atlanta waited eight hours to vote on the last day of early voting Friday.

National: Some states have embraced online voting. It’s a huge risk. | Eric Geller/Politico

Some West Virginians voting in Tuesday’s primary will be allowed to tap on their phones or laptops instead of heading to the polls. Some in Delaware will get to do the same next month. And the trend may spread into November, as the coronavirus pandemic inspires a search for voting methods that don’t expose people to the deadly disease. But moving elections to the internet poses huge risks that the United States is unprepared to handle — endangering voters’ privacy, the secrecy of the ballot and even the trustworthiness of the results. The problems: The internet is riddled with security flaws that hackers can exploit. So are voters’ computers, smartphones and tablets. And the U.S. has never developed a centralized digital identity system like the one in Estonia, a tiny, digitally savvy nation that has held its elections online since 2005. “Securing the return of voted ballots via the internet while ensuring ballot integrity and maintaining voter privacy is difficult, if not impossible, at this time,” four federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm and the FBI, warned in a bulletin last month. They called it far riskier than mail-in voting, the technology that has drawn the bulk of the political debate during the pandemic. On Sunday, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan revealed numerous security flaws in the product that West Virginia and Delaware are using, saying it “represents a severe risk to election security and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection.”

National: Democracy Live Internet Voting System Can Be Hacked, Researchers Warn | Lucas Ropek /Government Technology

An online voting platform that has seen recent adoption by numerous state and county governments has vulnerabilities that could be exploited to change votes without the knowledge of election officials, a new report alleges. The OmniBallot, which is a product of Seattle-based tech firm Democracy Live, purports to offer “secure, accessible remote balloting for all voters” and is being used by state or county governments in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, New Jersey and West Virginia. The company developed a number of contracts for limited Internet voting pilot programs with states earlier this year, after COVID-19 threatened to disrupt primary elections nationwide. These programs are fairly limited in scope and largely focus on overseas voters and the disabled. However, computer science researchers say what the company really offers is an insecure platform. The recently published report from professors Michael J. Specter, of MIT, and J. Alex Halderman, of the University of Michigan, states that the company “uses a simplistic approach to Internet voting that is vulnerable to vote manipulation by malware on the voter’s device and by insiders or other attackers who can compromise Democracy Live, Amazon, Google, or Cloudflare [its partners].”

National: Major Problems With Voting in Atlanta as 5 States Hold Primaries | Astead W. Herndon and Stephanie Saul/The New York Times

Georgia election officials, poll workers and voters reported major trouble with voting in Atlanta and elsewhere on Tuesday as the state’s primaries got underway, most critically a series of problems with new voting machines that forced many people across the state to wait in long lines and cast provisional ballots. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on Twitter that voting machines were not working in many parts of the city. Poll workers in several locations were having difficulty operating the machines, which were new models. “If you are in line, PLEASE do not allow your vote to be suppressed,” Ms. Bottoms wrote. “PLEASE stay in line.” Nikema Williams, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, said she had 84 text messages reporting voting problems within 10 minutes of the polls opening at 7 a.m. Ms. Williams, who is a state senator from Atlanta, said that in some locations the voting machines did not work and in at least one other no machines ever arrived. “It’s a hot mess,” Ms. Williams said. “How do you not have a voting machine?”

National: Cyber Command creates new malware sharing portal with National Guard | Mark Pomerleau/The Fifth Domain

A new portal created by U.S. Cyber Command and the National Guard provides a two-way interface for sharing malware and gain better insights into cyber threats facing the nation, according to a June 9 release from the command. This portal, called Cyber 9-Line, allows participating Guard units from their perspective states to quickly share incidents with Cyber Command. Cyber Command’s elite Cyber National Mission Force, which conducts operations aimed at disrupting specific nation state actors, is then able to provide analysis on the malware and offer feedback to the states to help redress the incident. “This level of cooperation and feedback provides local, state and Department on Defense partners with a holistic view of threats occurring in the United States and abroad,” said Brig. Gen. William Hartman, commander of the Cyber National Mission Force and the lead for Cyber Command’s election security group. “Dealing with a significant cyber incident requires a whole-of-government defense, bidirectional lines on communication and data sharing enables the collective effort to defend elections.”

Editorials: Will Vote-by-App Ever Be Safe? | Scott White/Dark Reading

Even with strong security measures, Internet voting is still vulnerable to abuse from state-sponsored actors and malicious insiders. The push for online voting has been happening for years, but now that a major pandemic has hit the US, there is more incentive than ever for states and counties to try out online and mobile voting services. This summer, Delaware and West Virginia will allow online voting in their primaries, and New Jersey is also testing it in a municipal election. The Utah GOP recently used mobile voting in a virtual state convention. Other states and counties are likely to follow. These solutions are far from perfect; to call them “experimental” is putting it nicely. Most of the current providers are new companies with relatively small development teams. Multiple researchers like MIT and Trail of Bits have found vulnerabilities in the voting app created by Voatz. It’s also concerning that the app developer appears to be antagonistic to the security community about such vulnerability research. And let’s not forget what happened to Shadow Inc.’s IowaReporterApp during the Iowa Democratic presidential caucus this past February. The inherent vulnerability of app-based voting is a serious cause for concern, but governments and political parties are likely to pursue them anyway. So, let’s take a closer look at where the problems are.

Editorials: It’s up to the states to prevent an Election Day fiasco | David Ignatius/The Washington Post

Tuesday was primary day in West Virginia, and the Republican-led state government there did something sensible that other states should embrace: They made it easier to cast absentee ballots. All 50 states and the District of Columbia permit absentee voting, but they don’t always make it simple. West Virginia is one of about 16 states that require a medical reason or other excuse. But because of covid-19, West Virginia declared a general medical excuse and mailed absentee ballots to all 261,000 voters who asked for them. By Tuesday, about 85 percent of those ballots had been cast and received. “The voters should have confidence in the system,” Andrew “Mac” Warner, the West Virginia secretary of state, told me during an interview on Tuesday. Warner is a pro-Trump Republican. But he’s also a 23-year Army veteran, and he knows how hard it can be to vote. Absentee voting presents opportunities for fraud, he says, but they can be managed.

Voting Blogs: Democracy Live internet voting: unsurprisingly insecure, and surprisingly insecure | Andrew Appel/Freedom to Tinker

The OmniBallot internet voting system from Democracy Live finds surprising new ways to be insecure, in addition to the usual (severe, fatal) insecurities common to all internet voting systems. There’s a very clear scientific consensus that “the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots” because “no known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the Internet.” That’s from the National Academies 2018 consensus study report, consistent with May 2020 recommendations from the U.S. EAC/NIST/FBI/CISA. So it is no surprise that this internet voting system (Washington D.C., 2010) is insecure , and this one (Estonia 2014) is insecure, and that internet voting system is insecure (Australia 2015) , and this one (Sctyl, Switzerland 2019), and that one (Voatz, West Virginia 2020) A new report by Michael Specter (MIT) and Alex Halderman (U. of Michigan) demonstrates that the OmniBallot internet voting system from Democracy Live is fatally insecure. That by itself is not surprising, as “no known technology” could make it secure. What’s surprising is all the unexpected insecurities that Democracy Live crammed into OmniBallot–and the way that Democracy Live skims so much of the voter’s private information.

Editorials: Coloradans can trust the mail ballot | Wayne Williams/Colorado Politics

Colorado’s 64 county clerks this week will mail out ballots to 3.5 million Coloradans.  Having served four years as Colorado’s 38th secretary of state, I want to highlight some of Colorado’s election protections and why Colorado’s voters can be assured that the mail ballot they cast will be counted accurately. Accurate voter lists:  Mail balloting starts with having an accurate voter database, and Colorado updates ours daily based on changes voters make at govotecolorado.gov and a host of other sources.  Voters’ addresses are updated from address changes with the U.S. Postal Service and from driver’s licenses.  Voters who are deceased are removed based on data from Colorado death certificates and from the Social Security Death Index.  We check to ensure that non-citizens had not registered, a process that will continue over the coming months. We cross-reference our database with the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — a voluntary organization of 30 states — to ensure voters are registered in only one state, and we refer for prosecution individuals who vote in more than one jurisdiction.

Editorials: Washington, D.C., Deserves Statehood | Susan E. Rice/The New York Times

One of my earliest memories is of walking along a burned-out 14th Street in my hometown Washington, D.C., in 1968, holding one parent’s hand as the other pushed my brother in a stroller; I was 4 years old. They took us to witness the destruction that arose from rage following the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and later to the Poor People’s Campaign for economic justice encamped on a muddy National Mall. My parents wanted to teach us that the America they loved harbored injustices and systemic racism, yet it was a union we had a duty to try to perfect. Fifty-two years later, not nearly enough has changed. Entrenched bigotry and senseless violence against African-Americans persist. We still have much to do to make this a truly equal and just America — from eradicating police brutality and reforming the criminal justice system to ensuring access to affordable housing, quality health care and education, and decent jobs for all regardless of the color of their skin. An often overlooked piece of the justice agenda was cast into stark relief last week, when President Trump ordered heavily armed federal forces into the District of Columbia against the will of Mayor Muriel Bowser. Largely because Washington lacks statehood, Mr. Trump had the authority to line city streets with military Humvees, to fly Black Hawk helicopters dangerously low to terrorize protesters, to fill the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with military personnel and to deploy thousands of federal forces, many unidentifiable with no discernible chain of command, like Russian “Little Green Men,” to intimidate residents.

Georgia: From Long Lines To Frustrated Voters, Georgia Election Plagued By Problems | Steve Peoples, Ben Nadler and Sudhin Thanavala/Associated Press

Voters endured heat, pouring rain and waits as long as five hours Tuesday to cast ballots in Georgia, demonstrating a fierce desire to participate in the democratic process while raising questions about the emerging battleground state’s ability to manage elections in November when the White House is at stake. “It’s really disheartening to see a line like this in an area with predominantly black residents,” said Benaiah Shaw, a 25-year-old African American, as he cast a ballot in Atlanta. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had said his office wouldn’t begin to release results in Georgia until the last precinct had closed. He predicted the winners may not be known for days.

Georgia: In a Warning for November, Voters Endure Long Lines in Georgia’s Primary Election | Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

Voters in Georgia’s primary election Tuesday endured long lines at some voting sites, after the state adopted new voting machines and suffered shortages of poll workers because of the coronavirus pandemic. Some voters said they waited for hours to cast a ballot, though the state had been encouraging absentee voting. State officials said many of the delays occurred because poll workers were unfamiliar with the new voting machines or were due to other administrative issues such as equipment being delivered late. The delays in Georgia underscore the challenges for election officials across the country as they respond to the pandemic, cybersecurity concerns, and other hurdles ahead of November’s general election. “For November, we need to do a much better job of planning for the tens of millions of Americans who are going to be voting in person,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who has been working with the Georgia secretary of state’s office. “We need to offer options for voters.”

Georgia: Primary elections quickly descended into chaos, with voting-machine problems, a lack of paper ballots, and hours-long lines at polling places | Grace Panetta/Business Insider

Voters throughout the metro Atlanta area faced immense difficulties voting in Georgia’s primary election on Tuesday because of widespread problems with new electronic machines malfunctioning and shortages of paper ballots. Local reporters and voters said that in many precincts in the counties in and around Atlanta, including Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, and Cobb, undertrained poll workers ran into trouble getting the new voting machines to work, and polling stations didn’t have enough paper ballots for every voter to cast a provisional ballot, leading to hours-long lines. Many people didn’t get to vote at all. Georgia had sent absentee-ballot requests to every active registered voter because of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to record levels of mail-in voting. But the pandemic also meant shortages of poll workers and far fewer in-person polling places. While Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on Monday that long lines were expected, the system experienced a meltdown on Tuesday as machines were delivered to the wrong place and officials had trouble getting them to work.

Georgia: ‘I Refuse Not to Be Heard’: Georgia in Uproar Over Voting Meltdown | Richard Fausset, Reid J. Epstein and Rick Rojas/The New York Times

Georgia’s statewide primary elections on Tuesday were overwhelmed by a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems put in place after widespread claims of voter suppression during the state’s 2018 governor’s election. Scores of new state-ordered voting machines were reported to be missing or malfunctioning, and hourslong lines materialized at polling places across Georgia. Some people gave up and left before casting a ballot, and concerns spread that the problems would disenfranchise untold voters, particularly African-Americans. Predominantly black areas experienced some of the worst problems. With Republican-leaning Georgia emerging as a possible battleground in this year’s presidential election and home to two competitive Senate races, the voting mess rattled Democratic officials and voters, with some blaming the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state for hastily instituting a new voting system without enough provisional ballots in case the voting machines did not function. “It is a disaster that was preventable,” Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost the disputed 2018 governor’s race, said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “It is emblematic of the deep systemic issues we have here in Georgia. One of the reasons we are so insistent upon better operations is that you can have good laws, but if you have incompetent management and malfeasance, voters get hurt, and that’s what we see happening in Georgia today.”

Georgia: Georgia Betrays Its Voters Again | Charles Bethea/The New Yorker

In November of 2018, Alyssa Thys, a twenty-nine-year-old communications manager in Atlanta, waited in line for more than two hours to vote for Stacey Abrams, at her precinct in a working-class, predominantly black neighborhood. Thys, to whom I spoke at the time, called the experience “complete chaos and disorganization.” She returned to the same place, Pittman Park Recreation Center, on Tuesday, to vote in the primaries. (In the most high-profile race, seven Democrats, including Jon Ossoff, are running for the opportunity to unseat Georgia’s senior Republican senator, David Perdue, in November.) “Like, wow,” Thys, who is white, told me after another frustrating morning. “Nothing has been learned.” She’d arrived early again—at 6:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before polls opened—and there was a line “down the block,” she told me, lengthened by social distancing. A few dozen would-be voters were already queued up ahead of her. “People thought they didn’t have the correct number of machines again,” she said. As it turned out, there were more machines than two years ago—eight working machines, Thys believed, rather than the three on site in 2018. But they’re new machines, which require printing out completed paper ballots and placing them in a secured box. “They just didn’t have any of that paper that was supposed to be printed,” Thys said, “which is, like, half of the entire system meant to prevent election fraud.”

Iowa: Vote by mail: After record primary turnout, Iowa Senate Republicans try to limit vote-by-mail in presidential election | Nicole Goodkind/Fortune

Iowa set a new record for primary election turnout this month after secretary of state Paul Pate sent applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters. More than 520,000 ballots were cast, according to Pate’s office, beating the previous record of 450,000 set in 1994. Now, Republicans in the state senate are trying to prevent him from doing the same in the general election this November. The Iowa Senate State Government Committee advanced a 30-page bill on a party-line vote late last week that would prohibit Pate, also a Republican, from proactively sending applications for mail-in-ballots to all registered voters. Anyone who wanted a mail-in ballot would need to submit a written request on their own and show proof of valid voter identification. The bill would prohibit the secretary from taking emergency election action in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The secretary can make changes in cases of extreme weather or during wartime, it says, but not during a health crisis. It also prevents Pate from making any changes to the early or absentee voting process, even in an emergency.

Nevada: Long lines at few polling spots clog Nevada primary voting | Ken Ritter and Sam Metz/Associated Press

Hundreds of people waited for hours at three in-person voting sites in the Las Vegas area, and the only one in Reno, after polling places were reduced due to the coronavirus. People who did not mail in their choices were still casting ballots Wednesday in a primary to settle U.S. House races, legislative primaries and other state and local races. State election officials promised that everyone in line when polls closed at 7 p.m. Tuesday would be allowed to vote, and predicted long delays counting ballots as a result. The Republican secretary of state’s office responded to criticism from a Democratic Party leader about long lines and limited in-person polling places with a statement saying Nevada voters had “ample opportunity … to cast a ballot in the 2020 Nevada primary election.” Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Wayne Thorley said that ballots were mailed to “every registered voter in Clark County,” voters had 14 days of early voting.

Nevada: Long lines to vote delay Nevada election returns | John Sadler/Las Vegas Sun

Early returns from Nevada’s primary election Tuesday were delayed after polling places in the state’s two most populous counties were kept open to allow those waiting in long lines to vote. Voters at some Las Vegas-area polling places Tuesday were waiting in lines of three hours or more despite Nevada officials encouraging people to cast their primary election ballots by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic. In the Reno area, Washoe County officials reported delays of at least an hour. Hundreds were still in line when polls were supposed to close at 7 p.m. The top-ticket races that voters were settling included contests for Nevada’s four U.S. House seats, but the incumbents — three Democrats and a Republican — are expected to sail through primary challenges. The biggest question Tuesday was which candidates will try to unseat them in November. Nevada reduced in-person voting sites for the primary because of the coronavirus and instead sent absentee ballots to voters that could be mailed back or dropped off. For those who still showed up at the limited number of polling places, they were casting ballots Tuesday on paper rather than voting machines to limit contact with shared surfaces.

New Hampshire: State approves letting anyone register to vote by mail | Kevin Landrigan/New Hampshire Union Leader

Voters may register to vote by mail for New Hampshire elections if concerns over COVID-19 are why they do not wish to sign the paperwork in person, according to a new legal opinion. Secretary of State Bill Gardner and Attorney General Gordon J. MacDonald have said the risk of the novel coronavirus calls for loosening up the requirement in state law that voter registration business has to be done at the city or town clerk’s office. “Registrants who are unable to register to vote in person because of illness from COVID-19 or because they fear registering in person may expose themselves or others to COVID-19 may use absentee registration,” Gardner and MacDonald ruled. Those seeking to register to vote by mail must request by mail, email, fax or phone to be sent these voter registration forms. Once the voter receives the forms, they still must have someone witness signing those documents.

Pennsylvania: Mail-in voting delays in primary cause Pennsylvania to sound alarm about November | Meg Cunningham and Quinn Scanlan/ABC

With Pennsylvania’s presidential and statewide primary June 2 its first election in which any voter could choose to vote by mail, election officials were always prepared for an increase in applications to do so. What they weren’t expecting was the coronavirus pandemic and the 17-fold increase in voters wanting to cast their ballots away from the polling precincts. Now, a week after the primary, votes are still being counted, leading local election officials to sound the alarm, warning America may not know the outcome in the battleground state on election night in November. “We don’t want the world on our front step, waiting for us to tell them who won. It’s as simple as that,” said Lee Soltysiak, the chief operating officer and chief clerk for Montgomery County, a suburb of Philadelphia. Soltysiak told ABC News Monday that he expected to be done tabulating all the ballots received by the time polls closed at 7 p.m. on June 2 but that didn’t include any of the approximately 5,800 additional ballots received after that point that still need to be counted.

Pennsylvania: Mail ballots for 2020 primary election arrived late by the thousands | Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

Tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters were almost disenfranchised last week. Thousands of others actually were. And things could be even worse in November. That’s the clear takeaway from a review of state data on mail ballots, along with interviews with elections officials in several of Pennsylvania’s largest counties: Tens of thousands of ballots arrived in the week after the June 2 primary election, and thousands more voters who applied to vote by mail ended up using provisional ballots at the polls instead. Most of those votes will be counted after orders from Gov. Tom Wolf and judges extending ballot deadlines for specific counties. But that leaves thousands of votes in the rest of the state uncounted. And those orders applied only to this election, leaving in place what many election officials say are problematic deadlines that will continue to ensnare voters in November and future elections. “These deadlines have real consequences,” said Delaware County Council Member Christine Reuther. “And one of them is, people are going to be disenfranchised.”

South Carolina: Voters report races missing from ballots at Richland polls during primary | Greg Hadley/The State

On an unprecedented Election Day, reports of problems at polling stations across Richland County have been rolling in. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic that led to increased requests for absentee ballots, there has been a shortage of poll workers at combined precinct locations and issues with ballots, as well. “We’re not off to the start I’m looking for,” Terry Graham, interim director for the Richland County Elections Board, told The State on Tuesday morning. Graham could not immediately be reached for comment in the afternoon. Graham also told the newspaper that he went into the day knowing there would a shortage of poll workers but didn’t expect so many to be unavailable. State Rep. Beth Bernstein, whose 78th district is based in Richland County, said the number of poll workers was significantly down. “When we normally have 900 to 1,000 poll workers for our election, a month out we were at like 300 and something,” she said. “I do believe it came up to maybe 500 or 600, I don’t have those exact numbers, but it was significantly less.”

Tennessee: State, Groups Clash Over Compliance in Vote-By-Mail Ruling | Jonathan Mattise/Associated Press

Attorneys for voting rights groups want Tennessee officials held in contempt of court over claims they have not immediately let all Tennessee voters get ballots to vote by mail during the coronavirus pandemic as ordered. The state, in turn, has contended it is complying and the groups are citing out-dated instructions for local election officials. That fight over whether Tennessee officials are meeting their obligations on the court-ordered absentee voting option for all 4.1 million of Tennessee’s registered voters is headed for a hearing Thursday in Nashville. At the same time, the state is also fighting to have the expansion blocked on appeal. In a Davidson County Chancery Court filing Monday night, plaintiffs attorneys wrote that the judge didn’t order the state to create a new form with a COVID-19 option, though it still did. The judge’s ruling directed voters to select an existing illness and disability box. The new option says, “I have determined it is impossible or unreasonable to vote in-person due to the COVID-19 situation, and therefore qualify as hospitalized, ill, or disabled and unable to appear at my polling place.” The filing points out there’s no explanation of what constitutes “impossible or unreasonable.”

Australia: Electoral Commission makes progress with 2018 modernisation project | Asha Barbaschow/ZDNet

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is heading a project to modernise its systems, having reached out to the market in 2018 for help on shaping the future of its IT backend. At the time, the AEC said the core software platforms in place had been in use for around 30 years, with its systems environment comprising of approximately 93 systems and supporting sub-systems. The commission has this week published a request for tender (RFT) for an enterprise architecture tool (EA tool), seeking help with the delivery of its modernisation project. The AEC normally operates out of 90 premises around Australia and has 780 staff. When an election is announced, that scales to more than 7,900 premises and approximately 90,000 staff. AEC offices are organised geographically, with a national office in Canberra, an office in each state, and divisional offices in or near each of the electoral divisions. The AEC currently has a small enterprise architecture practice team located within its Information and Communication Technology branch.

Russia: Moscow Said to Hire Kaspersky to Build Voting Blockchain With Bitfury Software | Anna Baydakova/CoinDesk

Voting and blockchain have been a controversial couple but Moscow appears determined to use the technology for a national referendum involving President Vladimir Putin. Russia will vote on changing its constitution, adopted in 1993, on July 1. The main issue to be decided is whether to allow Russia’s president to stay in power for more than the current limit of two consecutive six-year terms. Most of the nation will use traditional paper ballots, but residents of Moscow and the Nizhny Novgorod region will have the option of casting their votes electronically and, at least in the Muscovites’ case, having them recorded on a blockchain. According to an official page dedicated to electronic voting, Moscow’s Department of Information Technologies, which is working on the technical solution, plans to use Bitfury’s open-source enterprise blockchain, Exonum. “The blockchain technology is working in the Proof of Authority mode,” the page says in Russian. “A smart contract for the ballot ledger will be recording the votes in the system, and after the voting is complete it will decode them and publish them in the blockchain system.” The Department of Information Systems did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment by press time. Bitfury’s spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s involvement in the project.

National: Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks | Elise Viebeck/The Washington Post

As nearly every state expands its capacity for absentee voting this year, President Trump and his GOP allies have attacked the process as prone to rampant fraud. But a Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent. The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election. The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims. Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.

National: Online Voting System Used in Florida and Elsewhere Has Severe Security Flaws, Researchers Find | Kim Zetter/OneZero

New research shows that an internet voting system being used in multiple states this year is vulnerable to hacking, and could allow attackers to alter votes without detection. On Sunday, researchers published a report that details how votes in OmniBallot, a system made by Seattle-based Democracy Live, could be manipulated by malware on the voter’s computer, insiders working for Democracy Live, or external hackers. OmniBallot is currently used in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia. Though online voting has typically been used by overseas military and civilian voters, it could expand to more voters in the future due to the pandemic. The researchers found that bad actors could gain access to ballots by compromising Democracy Live’s network or any of the third-party services and infrastructure that the system relies on, including Amazon, Google, and Cloudflare. “At worst, attackers could change election outcomes without detection, and even if there was no attack, officials would have no way to prove that the results were accurate,” the researchers, Michael Specter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, write. “No available technology can adequately mitigate these risks, so we urge jurisdictions not to deploy OmniBallot’s online voting features.”

National: Study finds vulnerabilities in online voting tool used by several states | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Michigan found multiple security vulnerabilities in an online voting tool being used by at least three states. The study evaluated Democracy Live’s OmniBallot, a program that Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginia are using to allow military personnel and voters with disabilities to cast ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also has a contract with the Defense Department to provide ballots to military personnel overseas. According to the paper published Sunday, the system opens up the voting process to a range of vulnerabilities that could lead to election interference. “We conclude that using OmniBallot for electronic ballot return represents a severe risk to election security and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection,” the researchers wrote.