Editorials: Why Are Florida Republicans So Afraid of People Voting? | The New York Times
Coral Nichols will be eligible to vote when she’s 190. That’s assuming the 40-year-old Floridian — who served five years in prison for fraud and embezzlement, followed by nearly 10 years on probation — is able to keep up with her $100 monthly restitution payments. Jermaine Miller thought he had fully repaid the $223.80 he owed in restitution for a 2015 robbery and trespass conviction. In fact, he paid $18.20 more than that, but Florida says he still has a balance due of $1.11 because of a 4 percent surcharge on restitution payments. On top of that, Mr. Miller owes $1,221 in court costs and fines, which he doesn’t have the money to pay. Ms. Nichols and Mr. Miller are two of more than 1.4 million Floridians with criminal records who have spent the last year Ping-Ponging between hope and despair over whether they can exercise their most fundamental constitutional right — the right to vote. Last November, nearly two-thirds of the state’s voters approved Amendment 4, a ballot initiative that erased Florida’s 150-year ban on voting by people with felony convictions, except for those convicted of murder or sexual offenses. It was one of the nation’s biggest expansions of voting rights in decades. Florida, which was one of just four states that imposed a lifetime voting ban, bars a higher percentage of its citizens from voting than any other state. The state also accounts for more than one in four citizens disenfranchised nationwide. But Florida’s Republican lawmakers decided Amendment 4 was too much democracy for their taste. In June, after thousands of formerly incarcerated people — including Jermaine Miller — had registered to vote, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law passed on party lines that effectively reinstates the ban for most of them, and for hundreds of thousands more people who had not yet registered.Editorials: 2020 and the black-box ballot box | Jon Evans/TechCrunch
One of the scarier notions in the world today is the prospect of American voting machines being compromised at scale: voters thrown off rolls, votes disregarded, vote tallies edited, entire elections hacked. That’s why the nation’s lawmakers and civil servants flocked (relatively speaking) to Def Con in Las Vegas this week, where hackers at its Voting Village do their best to prove the potential vulnerabilities — including, in some cases, remote command and control — of voting systems. There are several ways to help secure voting. One, thankfully, is already in place; the decentralization of systems such that every state and county maintains its own, providing a bewildering panoply of varying targets, rather than a single tantalizing point of failure. A second, as security guru Bruce Schneier points out, is to eschew electronic voting machines altogether and stick with good old-fashioned paper ballots.Editorials: Scientific evidence and securing the vote: Verdict is in, now we need the funds | Michael D. Fernandez/The Hill
The Senate Intelligence Committee recently released its much-anticipated report on election security and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Alongside the alarming insights regarding Russian interference, there are critical recommendations based on scientific evidence regarding the security of our voting process, including the replacement of “outdated and vulnerable voting systems.” In too many counties across the country, ballots are being cast on insecure electronic systems. These direct recording electronic systems record a voter’s selection directly to the machine’s memory and automatically tabulate votes. Many leave no physical record of the vote cast. Within the scientific community, there has been consistent alarm regarding the security vulnerabilities of these direct recording electronic systems. Just last year, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report finding that paperless direct recording electronic machines are not secure and should be removed from service as soon as possible. The committee of computer science and cybersecurity experts, legal and election scholars, social scientists, and election officials concluded that local, state, and federal elections should be conducted using human-readable paper ballots, either marked by hand or machine. Every effort should be taken to ensure that direct recording electronic machines are removed from service prior to the 2020 election. Regardless of the vendor or configuration, direct recording electronic systems are fundamentally unverifiable. While hacking is the most discussed concern, these systems are also vulnerable to everyday coding mistakes or errors that could lead to the same inaccurate results as malicious hacking. To effectively safeguard public confidence in our elections and democracy, we must ensure that every vote is counted accurately.Editorials: Mitch McConnell Mislabeled Election Security as a ‘Wish List of the Left.’ Period. | Ali Javery & Edgardo Cortés/Rewire.News
In the height of one of the most politicized times in U.S. history, election security is an issue that should not be partisan. But that’s how U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)—who continues to block election security efforts from a vote—framed the issue in a recent speech from the Senate floor. “Make no mistake—many of the proposals labeled by Democrats to be election security are measures, in fact, for election reform that are part of the wish list of the left,” McConnell said. Eligible voters already face hurdles to making their voices heard at the ballot box, including outdated voter rolls and difficultly accessing the polls. The added fear of foreign interference and tampering in our elections only add to the fear that Americans feel about voting. In an effort to ease that anxiety, states across the country have implemented election security reforms through bipartisan efforts. We’ve seen several prominent Republicans support or sign into law voting reforms that provide greater election security within their states. In the past five years alone, elected officials from states like Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Alaska have supported legislation or ballot measures to push automatic voter registration, among other voting reforms.Editorials: Election security in North Caroliba | Wilkes Journal Patriot
Well before most people seriously imagined the Russians might attempt to interfere with U.S. elections, the N.C. General Assembly passed a law requiring that all voting machines used in the 2020 election and beyond generate a paper record showing how votes were cast. The legislature took this action in 2013 because it recognized security weaknesses in touchscreen voting machines, which provide no paper record of how ballots were cast. This makes the touchscreen systems more vulnerable to outside interference than voting systems with paper ballots. Now, here we are in the summer of 2019 and about one-third of North Carolina’s counties still have these touchscreen-only voting systems that don’t meet the paper ballot requirement enacted in 2013. Mecklenburg and Guilford, two of the state’s most heavily populated counties, are among those still using the touchscreen systems that don’t meet requirements of the law.Editorials: North Carolina should require that all voting machines produce a clear ballot | Raleigh News & Observer
t seems obvious that when North Carolina voters cast their vote they should see a paper ballot showing their selections. But one-third of North Carolina counties — including Mecklenburg, but not any in the Triangle — are still using touchscreen voting machines that leave the recorded vote unclear to the voter and vulnerable to outside manipulation. The General Assembly recognized those weaknesses in 2013 when it passed a law that will require all voting machines used in the 2020 election and beyond to generate a paper ballot. But this being North Carolina and the subject being voting, this basic safeguard is turning into a dispute. For counties that still want to use touchscreen technology, the board must certify which voting machines counties can purchase that will meet the paper ballot requirement. The five-member State Board of Elections is temporarily split between two Republicans and two Democrats because of last week’s resignation by former Board Chairman Bob Cordle, a Democrat. The two Republican members want to approve a touchscreen machine that generates a paper ballot that accompanies each selected candidate’s name with a bar code that is read by an electronic tabulator. The two Democrats want all voting machines to generate a paper ballot with “human-readable marks,” such as a filled-in bubble. The board will vote on the requirements at its next meeting on Aug. 23.Editorials: Paper ballots remain the most secure | The Fayetteville Observer
Recently, the American public learned that hackers linked to Russia targeted election voting systems in all 50 states. The information came out of a Senate Intelligence Committee report, which also found “Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data.” There is no evidence that actual votes were changed, officials said, an assurance we have been given with every new revelation of Russian hacks into our voting process. But we are beginning to wonder how comfortable Americans remain in these assertions. One thing this new information makes crystal clear: Despite it being two-and-a-half years since the November 2016 election, we do not yet have a handle on the size, scope and depth of the Russian cyber-attacks that sought to influence the results. What we do know however, is that the most secure way to vote is also one of the oldest — paper ballots. That makes the current confusion at the N.C. State Board of Elections all the more frustrating. We could all be on paper ballots by now. Instead, we are in the summer of 2019 with a presidential election and congressional races set for next year, a Census year, and a wide swath of North Carolina is not even sure in what form their residents will cast their ballots. These include two of the state’s largest counties, Guilford and Mecklenburg. Both are using electronic voting machines set to be declared invalid by the state by year’s end.Editorials: What “Moscow Mitch” wants: An election overrun by trolls and plunged into chaos | Bob Cesca/Salon
n the interest of big-picturing the past week or so, we learned from the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee that Russian hackers successfully infiltrated election systems in all 50 states during the 2016 election cycle. We also learned that the accused felon who was installed as commander in chief as a likely consequence of that cyber-attack spent all weekend blurting racist gibberish on Twitter while cable-news talking heads wonder how it will play among the Midwestern diner crowd. Meanwhile, the Republican Senate majority leader refuses to pass any legislation safeguarding future elections. It’s like finding out you have cancer, only to discover your surgeon is a shaky-handed drunken clown with a malfunctioning weed-whacker, and no one seems to notice. The truth about what really happened in 2016 has been a slow drip, to put it mildly. Since Nov. 8, 2016, the extent of Russian infiltration of the American democratic process has been routinely and frustratingly underestimated and lowballed, with details gradually expanding from nothing to a few states to 39 states and now, with the 2020 election 15 months away, we’ve reached a full 50 states and, according to the Senate report, “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure.”Editorials: Mississippi’s electronic election systems need to be protected | Lena Mitchell/djournal.com
Mississippians will be voting in less than a week in primary elections to choose leadership for governor, lieutenant governor and other statewide offices, as well as state senators and representatives who will make decisions about our state laws. We will be choosing who will represent the parties in elections for county officials from district supervisors, circuit clerks, chancery clerks, tax collectors, tax assessors and so forth, to county prosecutors and surveyors. All of the mechanisms we use to make these important decisions that affect our daily lives have come into question with repeatedly validated reports that our election systems are vulnerable to tampering by foreign influences. The report released last week by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed what all U.S. intelligence agencies reported in 2016 – that Russia has accessed U.S. election systems and will continue to exploit those systems’ vulnerabilities. The report said that Russian operatives have hacked election systems in all 50 states, stealing identifying information on voters in 16 states.Editorials: ‘An Attack On The Nation Needs A National Response’: Lawmakers And Election Security | Alex Schroeder/WBUR
Robert Mueller was consistent on one point during his congressional testimony last week: Russian interference in U.S. elections is one of the most serious threats to American democracy he’s seen in his long career. On Wednesday, during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, asked the former special counsel if he thought "this was a single attempt by the Russians to get involved in our election," or there was "evidence to suggest that they'll try to do this again?" "Oh, it wasn't a single attempt," Mueller responded. "They're doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign." The very next day, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report saying that Russia probably attempted to infiltrate election systems in all 50 states. Also last week: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blocked two election security bills that made it out of committee with bipartisan support. In other words, a moment of potential bipartisanship is becoming partisan anyway, as the 2020 election looms.Editorials: Protecting American elections from sabotage is apparently now a partisan issue | Los Angeles Times
Securing American elections against foreign interference — including by Russian computer hackers breaking into U.S. election infrastructure — ought to be an urgent and bipartisan priority. But thanks to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Senate is about to leave Washington without acting on proposals to make it harder for Russia and other foreign actors to meddle. Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who took the threat of foreign election meddling more seriously than the president who appointed him, has announced that he is resigning. President Trump proposes to replace him with Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a Trump loyalist who attracted attention last week when he chastised former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III for saying that he couldn’t exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice. Taken together, these developments raise a concern that Washington won’t respond appropriately to a repetition — or escalation — of what Mueller described as a “sweeping and systematic” interference by Russia in the 2016 election. Mueller told the House Intelligence Committee last week that Russia was already interfering in the 2020 election “as we sit here.”Editorials: Why is Sen. Roy Blunt so nonchalant about cyber threats and 2020 election security? | The Kansas City Star
Remember how we went straight from “Ha ha, no reason to worry about so-called climate change,” to “Well, too late now to do anything about catastrophic climate change?” It’s still not too late to mitigate the damage, though. And let’s not let that same flawed thinking keep us from doing what we can, even at this late date, to minimize the serious threat of foreign cyber attacks ahead of next year’s election. As former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony last week reminded us, we’re in urgent need of the bipartisan election security legislation that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he has no intention of letting go forward. Could Russia intervene in another election, Mueller was asked. “They’re doing it as we sit here,” he answered, while “many more countries” race to catch up to Russia’s ability to compromise our democracy. Should one of these other countries ever attempt an incursion on behalf of a Democrat, we’re guessing that McConnell would not be quite so “c’est la vie.”Editorials: What Will It Take for Congress to Protect America’s Elections? | The New York Times
Testifying before Congress this week about his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, seemed eager — desperate, even — to drive home one message: foreign adversaries are intent on undermining American democracy, and the United States is still vulnerable to them. Even as Mr. Mueller declined to elaborate on most of his findings, he was unequivocal in warning that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential race, that it aims to do so again — “They’re doing it as we sit here,” he said — and that “many more countries” are developing similar capabilities. Declaring foreign interference “among the most serious” challenges to American democracy, he urged those with “responsibility in this area” to act “swiftly.” Mr. Mueller is right to be worried. While progress has been made in safeguarding the nation’s electoral system, partisan bickering has impeded Congress from enacting a range of important reforms, from improving coordination between state and federal authorities to upgrading election infrastructure to closing loopholes in campaign finance laws. As is often the case, the legislative bottleneck is in the Republican-controlled Senate, but both parties have done their part to politicize the issue.Editorials: Count every vote and count them all by hand | Tim Canova/South Florida Sun-Sentinel
The Florida advisory committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a public hearing last week on voter disenfranchisement in downtown Fort Lauderdale. I was privileged to speak on the issues surrounding my two campaigns against Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida’s 23rd Congressional District.
First, voter disenfranchisement is a serious issue. Too many fellow citizens have been barred from voting for life because of non-violent felony convictions, even years after completing their sentences. The Florida legislature should implement Amendment 4, passed last year by nearly two-thirds of Florida voters, to restore voting rights to non-violent felons, without punishing them for unpaid bills or fines. We don’t need a poll tax to stop people from voting when they are struggling to provide for their families.
In my testimony to the commission, I also pointed out wider threats to the franchise of all voters. When voting in Florida, after filling out a paper ballot, we hand the ballot to an election official, who then feeds the ballot through an electronic scanning machine. Imagine if instead that election official were to tear up your ballot right in front of you on account of your race, religion, gender or party registration. Of course, we would all be demanding a criminal investigation and prosecution of that official for depriving us of our most fundamental right to vote and to have our vote counted.
Now suppose, instead, that official feeds your ballot through an electronic scanning machine that contains wireless cellular modems. Imagine further that the source code for the software has been altered through the wireless modems to count your vote for candidates you did not even vote for. And then, afterward, the election supervisor simply destroys your ballot and those of all voters.
According to election experts, such as Dr. David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, that’s what may well have happened in both of our 2016 and 2018 elections against Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Experts believe the source code was altered to cap our vote at the same low percentage, regardless of demographic group, an outcome that one leading expert in computational science said was “as unlikely as winning the lottery every day for a year.”
That’s why we filed a formal complaint challenging our election results in the U.S. House of Representatives. But the Democrats on the House Committee for Administration have simply ignored our complaint to cover for Wasserman Schultz. These Democrats demand that we trust the science of climate change, but apparently, they are happy to ignore computational science and basic mathematical laws and principles when considering election rigging complaints.
We have also called for a criminal investigation of the Broward Supervisor of Elections office for the illegal destruction of all the ballots cast in our 2016 primary against Wasserman Schultz. Brenda Snipes, then the Broward elections supervisor, admitted in sworn videotaped depositions to wrongfully destroying the ballots, and a Florida circuit court ruled that she thereby violated numerous state and federal criminal statutes, including some punishable as felonies by up to five years in prison for each violation.
Editorials: Mueller gave a warning on Russian meddling. Congress — and America — should listen. | Washington Post
IF THERE is one thing former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III made clear in his Wednesday congressional testimony, it is that his investigation was not an “illegal and treasonous attack on our Country,” as President Trump characterized it in a tweet shortly before Mr. Mueller’s appearance. On the contrary, Mr. Mueller underscored that it was Russia that attacked the country’s democracy in the 2016 presidential election through a cyber-campaign designed to help Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump, the former special counsel confirmed, welcomed that assistance. A number of his top aides lied in the ensuing investigation. Those lies, Mr. Mueller said, impeded his probe. Perhaps most seriously, Mr. Mueller said Russia’s interference is continuing and will be repeated in the 2020 presidential election. “Over the course of my career, I have seen a number of challenges to our democracy,” Mr. Mueller said. “The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious.” He added: “They’re doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign.” What’s more, “many more countries” are also looking at election hacking.Editorials: Why is election security a partisan issue? | Pierluigi Stella/SC Media
Frankly I never thought that securing the elections would be a partisan issue. But then, why am I surprised? Anything that touches Washington becomes a partisan issue. Securing the elections, ensuring ballot machines can’t be hacked, and ensuring voter registration data isn’t altered or deleted should be a common goal for everyone in Washington. Elections are the core of a democracy; if we lose faith in that process, our very existence as a democratic country is in jeopardy. And yet, politicians find ways to spar also on these issues. The GOP wants to just send money to the states and allow them to do what they choose, as long as they generically “secure the infrastructure.” I guess they forget that we have 50 states and this approach would likely lead to 50 different approaches, an enormous waste of money and resources, and poor results across the board. It is clear that I prefer the Democrats’ approach. States need to be told what to do, i.e. they need to be held to a certain level of security standards; and this is achieved by setting clear policies and precise requirements.Editorials: Mueller testimony reminds us everyone except Trump knows Russians interfered in election | Paul Rosenzweig/USA Today
Before she was ousted by President Donald Trump, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said: "Two years ago, a foreign power launched a brazen, multi-faceted influence campaign ... to distort our presidential election. ... Let me be clear: Our intelligence community had it right. It was the Russians.” Everybody knows this. The only person who still has doubts is President Trump. When he testifies before Congress on Wednesday, former special counsel Robert Mueller has a unique opportunity to set the record straight and lay out the case for Russian election interference before the American public. Mueller’s testimony will be a watershed moment if facts still matter. Mueller’s testimony is important not because he’s a Democrat or a Republican, not because he delivers snappy soundbites or long, carefully constructed sentences, and not because one may favor impeachment or oppose it: It matters because the country must come to grips with the things Mueller found that should trouble us about an adversary Russia, and a campaign and a president who welcomed Russia’s help.Editorials: People privy to the intelligence are convinced another electoral attack is coming | Greg Sargent/The Washington Post
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had a conversation with Vox’s Kara Swisher that should worry anyone who thinks our elections should be free from foreign interference. Needless to say, this evidently doesn’t include President Trump, who has basically invited another round of foreign electoral sabotage, or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who refuses to allow the Senate to vote on any of the numerous bills that have been proposed to shore up our political system against such sabotage. So that basically rules out any serious legislative response in advance of the next attack. But what remains striking is how convinced Democrats who have seen the intelligence are that this is really going to happen. Schiff points out that Facebook recently refused to remove a viral video that was edited to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) look drunk, and notes that neither the tech companies nor our own government are prepared:“The tech companies aren’t ready,” Schiff said. “They don’t have, I think, their policies fully thought out yet. The government isn’t ready. We don’t have the technologies yet to be able to detect more sophisticated fakes.”
“And the public, by and large, when you bring up ‘deepfake,’ they don’t know what you’re referring to,” he added. “And so we don’t have much time. It’s eight months until the primaries begin to try to prepare the public, prepare ourselves, determine what other steps need to be taken to protect ourselves from this kind of disinformation.”