Editorials: How to Protect U.S. Elections From Russian Cyber Hacks | Phil Keisling/Fortune

From 1991 to 1999, my job as Oregon’s secretary of state gave me responsibility for working with local government officials to protect and ensure the integrity of the state’s election system. It’s of paramount importance in a functioning democracy that votes—as our citizens cast them—are collected and counted fully and accurately. Recent revelations about Russian efforts to affect the 2016 presidential election have unsettled citizens and election officials alike. To date, there’s no credible evidence that actual votes were tampered with or miscounted due to a cyber attack. But there’s growing unease about the potential vulnerability of the nation’s disparate election systems—operated by 50 states and thousands of local governments—to sophisticated hacks that could threaten the integrity of our voting systems. It’s impossible to guarantee with 100% certainty that election fraud won’t be attempted, or actually happen. But the collective goal must be to make such criminal activity—and that’s exactly what it is—exceedingly rare, easily detectable, and of minimal (or no) material consequence. … Mail-based voting systems today are far less risky than many polling place elections, precisely because they distribute ballots (and electoral risk) in such a de-centralized way. To have any semblance of success, an organized fraud effort must involve hundreds—if not thousands—of separate acts. All would be individual felonies, and all must go undetected to have any chance of success.

Editorials: Jeff Sessions Has Spent His Whole Career Opposing Voting Rights | Ari Berman/The Nation

On June 27, 2013, two days after the Supreme Court ruled that states with a long history of voting discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes under the Voting Rights Act, the mayor of Pasadena, Texas, proposed changing the structure of City Council elections so that whites could remain in control. With Latinos close to gaining a majority of seats in the racially divided city of 150,000 outside of Houston, Mayor Johnny Isbell proposed switching from eight City Council districts to six districts and two seats elected citywide—which would give white residents, who turn out in higher numbers, a better shot at electing their preferred candidates. The net effect was that one majority-Latino district was eliminated, and Latinos had three fewer seats on the council. Isbell proposed the change “because the Justice Department can no longer tell us what to do.” Voters narrowly approved the referendum in 2013, even though 99.6 percent of Latinos opposed it.

Editorials: Russia, Trump & Flawed Intelligence | Masha Gessen/The New York Review of Books

After months of anticipation, speculation, and hand-wringing by politicians and journalists, American intelligence agencies have finally released a declassified version of a report on the part they believe Russia played in the US presidential election. On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies’ finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” to help Donald Trump win the presidency—a finding the agencies say they hold “with high confidence.” A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read: the declassified version is twenty-five pages, of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published unclassified report by the CIA’s Open Source division. There is even less to process: the report adds hardly anything to what we already knew. The strongest allegations—including about the nature of the DNC hacking—had already been spelled out in much greater detail in earlier media reports. But the real problems come with the findings themselves.

Editorials: North Carolina GOP should drop effort to block 2017 election | News & Observer

A three-judge federal panel has delivered, to no one’s surprise, an expected order that North Carolina must push ahead with a special election in 2017. The election comes as a result of an earlier ruling ordering new legislative maps to be drawn by March 28 for new districts. Any districts that have to be altered to correct unconstitutional gerrymandering will have to hold special elections this year.

Editorials: The Rules of the Game: A New Electoral System | Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen/The New York Review of Books

Americans have been using essentially the same rules to elect presidents since the beginning of the Republic. In the general election, each voter chooses one candidate; each state (with two current exceptions) awards all its Electoral College votes to the candidate chosen by the largest number of voters (not necessarily a majority) in that state; and the president-elect is the candidate with a majority of Electoral College votes. Primary elections for president have also remained largely unchanged since they replaced dealings in a “smoke-filled room” as the principal method for selecting Democratic and Republican nominees. In each state, every voter votes for one candidate. In some states, the delegates to the national convention are all pledged to support the candidate getting a plurality of votes (again, possibly less than a majority). In others, delegates are assigned in proportion to the total votes of the candidates. These rules are deeply flawed. For example, candidates A and B may each be more popular than C (in the sense that either would beat C in a head-to-head contest), but nevertheless each may lose to C if they both run. The system therefore fails to reflect voters’ preferences adequately. It also aggravates political polarization, gives citizens too few political options, and makes candidates spend most of their campaign time seeking voters in swing states rather than addressing the country at large.There a re several remedies. Perhaps in order of increasing chance of adoption, they are: (1) to elect the president by the national popular vote instead of the Electoral College; (2) to choose the winner in the general election according to the preferences of a majority of voters rather than a mere plurality, either nationally or by state; and, easiest of all, (3) to substitute majority for plurality rule in state primaries.

Editorials: Showing ID at polling stations will not end election fraud | Matthew Cole/The Conversation UK

The UK’s former communities secretary, Eric Pickles, ended 2016 by claiming the mantle of defender of British democracy. To combat electoral fraud in local government he called for new controls to guarantee the probity of voting in municipal elections. Most notably, this would mean the requirement of voters to produce photographic ID before they are allowed into a polling booth. The proposals were dismissed by some as using “a sledgehammer to crack a nut”. But that metaphor may actually be too generous. The intended target of the reforms may be missed altogether, while the collateral damage to British elections could be significant. Pickles’s sledgehammer is more like a blunderbuss.

Editorials: Can and Should States Mandate Tax Return Disclosure as a Condition for Presidential Candidates to Appear on the Ballot? | Vikram David Amar/Verdict

Last week a few lawmakers in California went public with plans to introduce legislation in Sacramento that seeks to prevent presidential candidates who fail to disclose tax returns for the five most recent years prior to the election from having their names appear on the state’s November ballot in 2020 and beyond. The effort is patterned on a similar proposal being pushed by some legislators in New York state. The proposal there, dubbed the Tax Returns Uniformly Made Public (or TRUMP) Act, requires each presidential candidate to disclose tax returns prior to 50 days before the November election, else his name will not appear on the ballot and the state’s electors will be prohibited by state law from casting their votes for him in the so-called electoral college. While many voters (and certainly many journalists) seem to want access to candidates’ tax return information (to see possible conflicts of interest, levels and directions of charitable giving, relative aggressiveness in seeking to minimize tax burdens, and so forth) before presidential elections are held (and were disappointed that Mr. Trump departed from modern tradition in declining to produce his returns), state legislative proposals like the TRUMP Act raise a number of legal and policy issues; in the space below, I address some of them.

Editorials: The Assault on Democracy in North Carolina | Michael Dorf/Newsweek

A recent special legislative session in North Carolina failed to result in the repeal of House Bill 2—the infamous “bathroom law” that has made the Tar Heel State synonymous with anti-trans/anti-gay intolerance and thus cost businesses and workers millions of dollars. Yet that was only the second-most appalling legislative news from Raleigh in the past couple of weeks. The even bigger story is the state GOP’s effort to override the popular will. In November, North Carolina voters chose Democrat Roy Cooper to replace incumbent Republican Pat McCrory as their governor. McCrory took a month to concede, raising bogus voter-fraud allegations. Then, in a special session just two weeks before Cooper’s inauguration, the GOP-controlled North Carolina Legislature passed new measures that strip the governor of many of the position’s powers. As a lame-duck governor, McCrory signed those bills into law.

Editorials: A new model for South Carolina elections? | Jack Bass/The State

As South Carolina faces the prospect of spending millions of dollars to buy new voting machines, Oregon’s system of vote by mail offers a model that could not only save us money but also eliminate long lines and increase security for election results. Oregon’s system is used for all elections — federal, state and local, whether primary, general or special — and has been in operation for roughly 25 years. One result is increased voter participation by working parents and senior citizens. The system makes voter fraud virtually impossible, and research has shown that it favors neither party. The idea originated with Oregon county election officials and has fully met their goals of substantially saving money and increasing voter participation. Voting by mail has been adopted in whole or part by three Western states, and South Carolina could become a leader in showing it works in the South.

Editorials: The Electoral College Doesn’t Work the Way the Founding Fathers Intended | Robert Schlesinger/US News & World Report

Regardless of whether you want to preserve the Electoral College as it is, tweak it (as I do) or scrap it entirely, you have to understand that it doesn't function today the way the Founding Fathers planned. I think this is worth pointing out in light of the animated responses I've gotten from readers regarding my last column, which called for reform by adding a set of bonus electoral votes which would be rewarded to the winner of the national popular vote. People seem to make a couple of errors in their reverence for the Electoral College. First, they misunderstand its purpose, and concomitantly they misunderstand what it does and doesn't constitutionally entail.

Editorials: Florida’s felon vote: Destroying lives and wasting taxpayer dollars | Martin Dyckman & Darryl Paulson/Tampa Bay Times

Florida has what many consider to be the most rigid and unfair felony disenfranchisement law in the nation. The highly respected Sentencing Project declared in a recent report that "in 2010, more people are disenfranchised in Florida than in any other state and Florida's disenfranchisement remains highest among the 50 states." We are not thrilled that Florida leads the nation in denying more citizens of the right to vote than any other state. How far out of line is Florida? In the United States as a whole, 1.77 percent of whites and 7.66 percent of blacks are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction. In Florida, 10 percent of the voting age population (VAP) is disenfranchised, but 23 percent — or almost one out of four black voters — is disenfranchised. Nationally, about 6 million individuals have lost the right to vote due to a felony conviction; about 1.7 million or 27 percent of all those disenfranchised reside in Florida. The felon vote was part of a package of legislation designed to cope with the emergence of black voter majorities throughout the South after the Civil War. In 1867, 15,434 of Florida's 25,582 registered voters were black, something that Florida's white voters were unwilling to accept. In fact, it was not until after the Civil War that Florida banned all voters with a felony conviction.

Editorials: An overwhelming response on North Carolina Democracy article | Andrew Reynolds/News & Observer

Last week The News & Observer published my op-ed on the failing grade North Carolina received for our elections and democratic health. Boy did it touch a nerve. Hundreds of comments poured in and the article went viral on social media. After thousands of retweets, reaching over 5 million accounts, I stopped checking the stats. There were features in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, Huffington Post, Politico, even PerezHilton.com. Paul Krugman, Howard Dean and Fareed Zakaria tweeted it out to their millions of followers. The story ran around the world. On Christmas Eve the op-ed became the lead on the Twitter home page. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised. North Carolinians are exasperated as they watch the erosion of their democracy. We yearn for real change but feel impotent in the face of frozen power. More than ever, people are hungry for ideas on how to reverse the decline. There were thousands of comments online and I received over 100 emails directly. The vast majority agreed that our democracy was in trouble and thanked me for seeking to marshal evidence rather than use bluster. However, a small minority were very angry. There were online threats and abuse on my voicemail. I was told to go ‘back to Africa’ (I am not from Africa), I was told I was worse than cancer, feces, a fraud, a moron and corrupter of young people.

Editorials: Voter ID – The Smokescreen Of The Pickles Report | Michael Abberton/The Huffington Post UK

The Pickles report entitled Securing the Vote has very little to do with electoral fraud, and everything to do with vote suppression - the disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor. It also has hidden within it another insidious motive - local ‘voluntary’ registers of resident foreign nationals. The report was sneaked out right in the middle of the Xmas holidays, when parliament is not in session, obviously as the government hoped it might not get the scrutiny it warrants. The report is quite short and is based on Pickles’ involvement in the Tower Hamlets case, after the mayor was accused of electoral fraud (though no evidence of criminality was found). There are measures in the report that are based specifically on the allegations from that case; for example, electors being influenced to vote a certain way by religious leaders, something that the report recommends there should be legislation to stop (but how that would apply to bishops equally as it would to imams or other community leaders isn’t discussed).

Editorials: When ‘fraud’ is just another word for disenfranchisement | Kevin J. Hamilton and Jonathan S. Berkon/The Washington Post

For years, “voter fraud” has been a conservative rallying cry, used to justify ever more demanding voter identification and registration requirements. During the post-election face-off between Republican incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory and Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor-elect, Republican claims of voter fraud were put to the test. With few exceptions, they rather dramatically failed. On election night, Cooper led by more than 4,900 votes out of more than 4.5 million cast. Thousands of absentee and provisional ballots remained to be counted. Yet rather than let the counting process naturally play out, McCrory launched a series of baseless fraud allegations against voters. The North Carolina Republican Party churned out daily warnings of “dead voters,” “double voting,” “absentee ballot mills” and “absentee ballot harvesting.” Sounded awful. The only problem: For the most part, it wasn’t true. Let’s start with “dead voters.” Sounds bad and conjures images of ballots fraudulently cast in the name of the deceased. Except that’s not what this was about. This allegation was actually about voters who were alive at the time they voted but had died before Nov. 8. But because they were not alive on Election Day, these votes could be challenged and disallowed. We can debate that approach, but it hardly constitutes fraud.

Editorials: North Carolina’s HB2 impasse has its roots in gerrymandering | Bob Phillips/News & Observer

When state lawmakers couldn’t come together to repeal House Bill 2, it was just another sorry reminder of the toxic partisan divide that often renders the N.C. General Assembly dysfunctional. Compromise, trust and honest brokering seem to be out of reach for this body of elected officials that arguably has more impact on our lives than any other level of government. So what happened and why? The inability to repeal HB2 is a symptom of what is a grave threat to our democracy: partisan gerrymandering. When the majority party, whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, gets to draw its own districts for its own advantage, our whole elective system becomes unfair. The proof is in the legislative maps – illogically shaped districts creating a jigsaw puzzle covering our state, making lawmakers virtually unaccountable to voters. Consider our incoming legislature that will be sworn in this January. More than 90 percent of them ran uncontested in November or won their election by a comfortable double-digit margin. Largely because of gerrymandering, citizens have no choice and no voice in our elections.

Editorials: Verifying vote should be norm | Lou Novak/The Detroit News

From the moment that Jill Stein requested a presidential recount in Michigan, Donald Trump and his Republican cronies have tried to thwart it at every turn. Despite their obstructionism, the recount began earlier this month but was stopped a few days later. The recount opponents prevailed after an onslaught of political maneuvers and lawsuits that finally found favor in the Republican bench of the Michigan Court of Appeals. It’s a sad day for our democracy when politicking prevails over ensuring the integrity of our election system. And in the media’s coverage of the political play-by-play, we missed the forest for the trees. Throughout this election, voters have endured implications, rumors, and outright accusations about a “rigged” system—vocalized frequently by none other than the president-elect himself, who then did an about-face and fought tooth and nail to prevent the verification of the vote.

Editorials: North Carolina no longer a democracy | Andrew Reynolds/News & Observer

In 2005, in the midst of a career of traveling around the world to help set up elections in some of the most challenging places on earth – Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan and Yemen, among others – my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots. In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place. When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

Editorials: One person, one vote is a myth | William Chafe/News & Observer

Ever since our nation’s founding, the issue of equal voting rights has been central to our definition of democracy. After we fought the Civil War to end black slavery – the ultimate contradiction of living in a free republic – the country enacted the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Black people were guaranteed equal protection under the laws; black men earned the right to vote. Women too had demanded the suffrage, a battle they finally won with ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. And in a fight waged under the slogan “one person, one vote,” the civil rights movement secured enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Finally, it seemed, America had guaranteed the right of every citizen, black or white, male or female, to have equal access to the polling place – one person, one vote. Alas, it was not true. One reason was the existence of the Electoral College, an institution that by design sought to deny one person, one vote. Almost always, this denial was connected to the issue of race.

Editorials: Russian Meddling and Europe’s Elections | The New York Times

While revelations about Russian involvement in the American presidential election rock the United States, there are ominous signs that Russia is spreading propaganda and engaging in cyberattacks in Europe in advance of several national elections next year. In 2017, Germany, France and the Netherlands will hold elections. It is also possible that Italy will move elections scheduled for 2018 forward in the wake of the resignation of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi after voters rejected a referendum on constitutional reforms this month. Candidates who are right-wing populists and friendly toward Russia are gaining ground across Europe, thanks, in part, to Russian interference along the lines of what Moscow was accused of doing in the United States. Russia’s goals in Europe appear to be to elect foreign leaders who are sympathetic to Russian expansionism, to weaken NATO and to fan anti-European Union forces. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front party benefited in 2014 from an $11.7 million Kremlin loan to help finance its campaigns. And the winner of the center-right Les Républicains party’s recent primary elections, François Fillon, has called for lifting sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and its war in Ukraine, and for working with Russia to curb immigration and prevent terrorism.

Editorials: I was the target of a Russian smear campaign. Now I understand the power of fake news. | Anne Applebaum/Chicago Tribune

We were told in June that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked by Russians. We were told in October that material subsequently passed on to WikiLeaks came from the same source and that President Barack Obama was considering a response. Numerous articles were written about these leaks and about Donald Trump’s many Russian connections. And yet no one was really outraged until now. Why? I have a theory: Until you have seen for yourself how 21st-century disinformation works, you laugh at the very idea of it. Once you have understood its power, you stop laughing. If I was slightly ahead of the curve, it’s because — like everyone who ever wrote critically about Russia — I saw early on how it worked. A couple of years ago, I was the focus of a smear campaign, elements of which could have been lifted out of a spy novel. In the wake of the invasion of Crimea, I was writing quite a bit about Ukraine, when nasty little articles about me started appearing on Russia-based websites.The technique was th e same as that used by people who later dressed up the stories from the emails of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta: Mix truth and lies — my book contract and royalties were described as mysterious income from questionable sources — make ludicrous claims, pass on the lies to other Russian-backed websites, and then pass it on again.

Editorials: Guam, other territories deserve a real vote in House | Pacific Daily News

Guam Del. Madeleine Bordallo and other U.S. territory representatives need to push Congress to give them — and all those Americans they represent — a real voice in our nation, not some meaningless, token measure. Bordallo and representatives from the other U.S. territories are asking the U.S. House of Representative to again give them a symbolic vote during the Committee of the Whole, as they had in the 110th Congress and 111th Congress. Delegates from the territories can vote in the committees on which they serve, but not in the Committee of the Whole ­— in which all representatives serve to consider measures involving money issues — or on the floor during session.

Editorials: Why the Green Party Continues to Demand Presidential Recounts | David Cobb/The Nation

Presidential recounts are not about changing election results. At least, that is not their primary purpose. At their core, recounts are about ensuring confidence in the integrity of the voting system. It is unfortunate, if not all that surprising, that the two largest corporate-controlled political parties have chosen to stand in the way of these grassroots-demanded recounts—in the case of Republicans, actively blocking them in the courts; in the case of Democrats, capitulating in their refusal to push for them. In an election marked by so many irregularities, public distrust and outright evidence of hacking, Americans deserve to know now more than ever that the election was accurate and secure. That is the ultimate goal of this and every recount: to restore confidence in our elections and trust in our democracy. Consider the 2004 recount, for example. As the Green Party candidate for president that year, I led efforts to organize recounts in Ohio and New Mexico, in the wake of widespread complaints about the obstruction of legitimate voters, mostly in majority-black precincts, and tampering with computer voting machines on Election Day. The Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik supported our efforts, but the Democrats, led by nominee John Kerry, were silent. The investigations sparked by that recount did not change who won the electoral votes in New Mexico or Ohio. They did, however, uncover glaring problems with our voting system. A report published by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, spearheaded by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. John Conyers, found conclusive evidence that more than 100,000 voters—many concentrated in communities of color—were disenfranchised during the election. Among the irregularities caused by the intentional, illegal behavior included some 90,000 spoiled ballots, the improper purging of tens of thousands of voters by election officials, and improbably high turn out in certain counties, even surpassing 100 percent in some cases.

Editorials: Investigate Russian Hacking the Right Way | The New York Times

President-elect Donald Trump will assume office next month dogged by the question of whether a covert ploy by the Russian government had a decisive effect on his election. While a conclusive answer is likely to remain elusive, American voters deserve as many details as can be ascertained about Russia’s role in the campaign, to better protect the political process from similar interference in the future. The assessment by American intelligence agencies that the Russian government stole and leaked Clinton campaign emails has been accepted across the political spectrum, with the notable exception of Mr. Trump. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, called Russian meddling “unacceptable,” and said that under President Vladimir Putin, Moscow “has been an aggressor that consistently undermines American interests.” Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said in a recent interview that the fact that the “Russians were messing around in our election” is a “matter of genuine concern.” Addressing the issue properly will require a bipartisan congressional investigation led by people with the authority and intent to get to the truth, however disturbing that might be for the incoming administration and the Republican Party. The intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian hacking was meant to help elect Mr. Trump.

Editorials: A dangerous gambit: The failed electoral-college rebellion bodes ill for future elections | Steven Mazie/The Economist

The last-ditch effort by some Democrats to thwart a Donald Trump presidency ended in a fizzle on December 19th. The 538 members of the electoral college—the body that officially elects America’s chief executive, as ordained by Article II of the constitution—handed the real-estate magnate 304 votes, two shy of the total he was projected to win after the people voted on November 8th but a comfortable 34 votes more than the 270 he needed to win a majority. Mr Trump is set to be inaugurated as America’s 45th president on January 20th. The ill-fated Hail Mary was lobbed by a number of liberal intellectuals, including Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor and short-lived 2016 presidential candidate. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post last month, Mr Lessig observed that Hillary Clinton handily won the national popular vote. Since electoral-college electors are “citizens exercising judgment,  not cogs turning a wheel”, they should feel free to ignore the popular vote totals in their home states. Electors should then stand up for the principle of “one person, one vote”, Mr Lessig suggested, and switch their allegiance to Hillary Clinton. Other advocates called on Trump electors to use their independent judgment to vote for another, more savoury Republican. If 38 electors would opt for the likes of John Kasich or Mitt Romney, Mr Trump would fall short of 270 and the House of Representatives would get to pick the president from among the top-three vote getters. The House would then be free to send a Republican other than Mr Trump to the White House.

Editorials: Virtually no fraud found in voting — no surprise | News & Observer

Despite their considerable victories in November’s elections, Republicans have lost badly on one issue – voter fraud. Republican-led states, most notably North Carolina, have passed laws preventing people from voting in the name of another or registering people who are not eligible to vote, even as those restrictions made it harder or impossible for thousands of eligible voters to cast a vote. It’s a necessary protection, Republicans maintain. Indeed President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that “millions” of people voted illegally.More than a mont h after the general election, a fine-combing of the results shows what opponents of restrictive voting laws have always contended: voting fraud is a myth used to justify the suppression of voters likely to vote Democratic. The New York Times reported this week that elections officials in 26 states and the District of Columbia had no cases of voter fraud. Eight other states said they had one allegation. This dearth of evidence comes out of an election in which 137.7 million Americans cast ballots and results in several states were closely examined through recounts. In North Carolina, where the Republican-led General Assembly passed the one of the strictest Voter ID laws in the nation, supporters of Gov. Pat McCrory combed through returns trying to overturn his narrow loss to Attorney General Roy Cooper. Almost all of the challenges were dismissed by Republican-controlled county election boards. Of 4.7 million votes cast, 25 were found to be wrongly cast by ineligible felons, most of whom may not have realized that their restriction voting extended not only to their time in prison, but through the duration of their post-release limitations.

Editorials: Faithless Electors: Now It’s Up to Congress | Derek T. Muller/Wall Street Journal

The 538 members of the Electoral College convened Monday and cast a majority of their votes for Donald Trump for president and Mike Pence for vice president. When Congress convenes on Jan. 6 to count the votes, it will mostly be a formality. But its decision to count or exclude the votes of some “faithless electors” will set a precedent for future elections. Faithless electors are those who are supposed to vote for the candidates named on the ballot but instead vote for someone else. States faced a number of faithless electors this year, mostly one-time supporters of Bernie Sanders. Democratic Party electors in Minnesota and Colorado were replaced when they attempted to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton. A Maine elector attempted to vote for Mr. Sanders; his vote was ruled improper, and he changed his vote to Mrs. Clinton. A Hawaii elector broke a state pledge and voted for Mr. Sanders. Four Washington state electors violated a state pledge and cast three votes for Colin Powell and one for Faith Spotted Eagle. Two Republican electors in Texas cast votes for Ron Paul and John Kasich. It is now the duty of Congress, which holds power under the Twelfth Amendment, to determine how to count the electoral votes from the several states.

Editorials: Time to End the Electoral College | The New York Times

By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as every other elected office — to the person who gets the most votes. But for now, the presidency is still decided by 538 electors. And on Monday, despite much talk in recent weeks about urging those electors to block Donald Trump from the White House, a majority did as expected and cast their ballots for him — a result Congress will ratify next month. And so for the second time in 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote has won the presidency. Unlike 2000, it wasn’t even close. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of the electorate. That’s a wider margin than 10 winning candidates enjoyed and the biggest deficit for an incoming president since the 19th century. Yes, Mr. Trump won under the rules, but the rules should change so that a presidential election reflects the will of Americans and promotes a more participatory democracy.

Editorials: American democracy is being derailed. Can faith be restored? | Richard Wolffe/The Guardian

Now that the electoral college has formally selected the next president of the United States, it’s worth taking a deep breath and asking: what kind of democracy do we live in? The will of the people ought to be clear after an election. But as 2016 draws to a close, there are deeply troubling signs that American democracy – after 227 years of seeking a more perfect union – has left the rails. It turns out it’s possible to win the governorship in North Carolina but find the job is stripped of power before you’re sworn into office. And across the nation, we abide by the archaic rules of an electoral college that has all but renounced its first responsibility: to elect someone fit to be president. The Founders may have wanted to prevent demagogues from taking power, but party hacks ignored all that original intent. It makes you wonder why the candidates and voters abide by the rules of a game that nobody is interested in playing.

Editorials: The Painfully Vulnerable Election System and Rampant Security Theater | James Scott/ICIT

The first step to correcting the plague of cyber-kinetic vulnerabilities riddling our election system is to admit these problems exist, then bring in qualified personnel to expediently patch vulnerabilities, upgrade technologies and erect cyber defenses around the perimeters of targeted technologies such as manufacturer updates, voting machines and scanners, state websites, state servers and local and state tabulators. This quick blog post is a last attempt by cybersecurity experts to influence local and state election officials to patch the listed vulnerabilities existing within their space that could hinder the natural outcome of the election process. Figure 3 in this post is a checklist for state officials to use when analyzing their networks for vulnerabilities pre-election. The results of the 2016 elections will decide: the next President of the United States, the majority control of the Senate, the potential to appoint up to four Supreme Court justices, and numerous state and local level positions. While political tensions and opinionated discourse run rampant in the days before the election, it is paramount to the continued solidarity of the United States of America, that the integrity of the election process remains demonstratively uncompromised. Election systems are vulnerable at the local, state, and manufacturer level. The decentralization of the U.S. election system offers no benefit to security. The fallacy of the decentralization argument is the conclusion that because systems are not networked at the state level, the result of the national election cannot be affected. This simply is not the case. All decentralization means is that while some states secure election systems to various degrees according to the modern threat landscape, other states barely secure systems at all. Security through obscurity is not a defense. As discussed the Hacking Elections is Easy! report series, an adversary who targets local machines in a pivotal county of a swing state or that targets a state tabulation system directly, can significantly impact the results of a national election through the results of the target state. Local and State level election systems are vulnerable to exploit due to black-box proprietary code, exploitable features and insecure design, vulnerable removable media, interconnectivity, and antiquated cybersecurity strategies. With mere days before Election Day, state and local election officials have limited options available to mitigate a tide of partisan backlash and allegations of fraudulent results.

Editorials: GOP electors should demand intel briefing on Russian hacking, too | Brent Budowsky/The Hill

The CIA, the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence now agree that Russia engaged in aggressive covert action to affect the presidential election and hoped to achieve the election of Donald Trump as president and commander in chief by doing so. Every Republican elector should join the large and growing number of electors who have called for a full intelligence briefing about the extent and purpose of Russian attacks on American democracy, Russia's interference in the recently concluded presidential campaign and Russia's desire to elect Trump on Election Day. A large and growing number of Electoral College electors have already called on Obama administration intelligence officials to provide them with an intelligence briefing about the Russian role in the election. However, it is inexcusable that most GOP electors have not joined them. GOP electors should be asked by the media and voters in their states: Do you care if the Russians engaged in espionage for the purpose of electing Trump?