National: Microsoft is reviewing its records for signs of potential Russian meddling during the 2016 election | Recode

Microsoft is currently reviewing its sales records to determine whether trolls aligned with the Russian government purchased ads on Bing or other company products during the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The decision to conduct an internal investigation comes as Microsoft’s tech industry peers — Facebook, Google and Twitter — contend with parallel probes by the U.S. Congress into the extent to which Kremlin-backed agents spread disinformation on their platforms around Election Day. “We take reports of misuse of our platform seriously,” a Microsoft spokesman said late Monday. “We are therefore investigating and if inappropriate activity is found, we will take steps to minimize such misuse in the future.” Reuters first reported the news.

National: The U.S. Election System Remains Deeply Vulnerable, But States Would Rather Celebrate Fake Success | The Intercept

When the Department of Homeland Security notified 21 states that Russian actors had targeted their elections systems in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the impacted states rolled out a series of defiant statements. … But in most cases, according to the DHS, Russian actors scanned the public-facing websites of state agencies, apparently looking for vulnerabilities. The DHS said that in almost all of the cases, there was no evidence the operatives attempted to exploit any vulnerabilities. It was not, in other words, a thwarted bank robbery. Instead, Russian operatives surveyed the bank from the sidewalk, and then headed home. While the states are busy celebrating their successes, they are doing far too little to ensure that operatives don’t get in next time they show up and actually try to infiltrate, say cybersecurity experts.

National: US senator seeks cyber info from voting machine makers | The Washington Post

A U.S. senator wants to know how well the country’s top six voting machine manufactures protect themselves against cyberattacks, a move that comes just weeks after federal authorities notified 21 states that they had been targeted by Russian government hackers during the 2016 presidential election. In a letter Tuesday to the CEOs of top election technology firms, Sen. Ron Wyden writes that public faith in American election infrastructure is “more important than ever before.” “Ensuring that Americans can trust that election systems and infrastructure are secure is necessary to protecting confidence in our electoral process and democratic government,” writes Widen, an Oregon Democrat.

National: Kobach plan for Trump included federal voting laws changes | McClatchy

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach urged President Donald Trump to pursue changes to federal voting law to promote proof-of-citizenship requirements, according to documents unsealed Thursday by a federal judge. Kobach, a candidate for Kansas governor and the vice chair of Trump’s voting commission, was photographed carrying a strategic plan for the Department of Homeland Security into a meeting with Trump in November. The American Civil Liberties Union sought the documents as part of an ongoing lawsuit challenging a Kansas law that requires voters to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when they register. Kobach was ordered to turn over the documents to the ACLU earlier this year, but the documents had been sealed until Judge Julie Robinson opened them Thursday.

National: Supreme Court takes up Wisconsin as test in partisan gerrymandering claims | The Washington Post

Opponents of political gerrymandering had reason for optimism at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the likely swing vote, appearing more in sync with liberal colleagues who seemed convinced that a legislative map can be so infected with political bias that it violates the Constitution. But it’s what Kennedy didn’t say that could determine whether the court, for the first time, strikes down a legislative map because of extreme partisan gerrymandering. While he has previously expressed concerns about the political mapmaking practice, he has yet to endorse a way of determining when gerrymandering is excessive, and Kennedy give no sign at oral arguments Tuesday that he had found one. In a case from Wisconsin that could reshape the way American elections are conducted, the Supreme Court heard from challengers that it was the “only institution in the United States” that could prevent a coming wave of extreme partisan gerrymandering that would distort the basic structure of democracy.

National: Kobach plan for Trump included federal voting laws changes | Associated Press

A Kansas official who later became vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s commission on election fraud drafted a proposal for Trump to change federal voter registration laws to promote proof-of-citizenship requirements by states, an unsealed federal court document showed Thursday. The proposal was part of a “strategic plan” for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security prepared by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and carried by him into a meeting in November with Trump, then the president-elect. It was among three proposals designed to “stop aliens from voting.” U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson ordered a highly-edited version of the document unsealed Thursday in a voting-rights lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union. Robinson also ordered the unsealing of a second document, prepared by Kobach and circulated within the Kansas secretary of state’s office, showing the text of proposed changes to federal law.

National: The ‘unique’ nature of the US voting system could help Russia tip the scales of future elections, experts say | Business Insider

The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told reporters on Wednesday he was disappointed that it had taken nearly a year for the Department of Homeland Security to notify 21 states that their voter registration systems had been targeted by hackers during the election. “There needs to be a more aggressive, whole-of-government approach in terms of protecting our electoral system,” said Democratic Sen. Mark Warner. “Remember, to make a change in a national election doesn’t require penetration into 50 states … arguably, you could pick two or three states, and two or three jurisdictions, and alter an election.”

National: Facebook Cut Russia Out of April Report on Election Influence | Wall Street Journal

Facebook cut references to Russia from a public report in April about manipulation of its platform around the presidential election because of concerns among the company’s lawyers and members of its policy team, according to people familiar with the matter. The drafting of the report sparked internal debate over how much information to disclose about Russian mischief on Facebook and its efforts to affect U.S. public opinion during the 2016 presidential contest, according to these people. Some at Facebook pushed to not include a mention of Russia in the report because the company’s understanding of Russian activity was too speculative, according to one of the people.

National: Think Automatic Voter Registration Just Benefits Democrats? Not Necessarily. | Governing

Over the past two years, nine states and the District of Columbia have quietly implemented a significant overhaul of the voter registration process, aiming to reduce bureaucracy and increase the number of people signed up to vote. Automatic voter registration, or AVR for short, essentially turns the current opt-in system of voter registration to an opt-out system. “When eligible citizens interact with certain government offices, they are added to the voter rolls unless they say no,” according to an article by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which is working to advance the idea. Two years ago, no state had AVR. Today, 1 in 4 Americans live in a state that has approved automatic voter registration. “AVR is coming,” says Natalie Tennant, a former Democratic secretary of state from West Virginia who is now the Brennan Center’s manager of state advocacy on voting rights and elections.

National: Trump Fraud Commissioner Is Continuing Voter Purge Crusade Side Job | TPM

A member of the President Trump’s voter fraud commission is continuing his separate crusade of bullying localities into purging their voter rolls, even as a witness at a commission meeting last month questioned the formula the commissioner has used to bring his claims. For years before J. Christian Adams was named to Trump’s voter fraud commission, he led a private group that sent letters and in some cases brought lawsuits against counties alleging that they had bloated voter rolls in violation of the National Voter Registration Act. To make those claims, he has compared the Census Bureau’s estimate of the number of a county’s citizens of voting age to the number of registered voters on its rolls. … However, as Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, testified at the voter fraud commission’s second meeting in New Hampshire last month, the comparison is not as simple as it looks.

National: Who’s Really in Charge of the Voting Fraud Commission? | ProPublica

On Friday, in response to a judge’s order, the Department of Justice released data showing the authors, recipients, timing, and subject lines of a group of emails sent to and from the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. They show that in the weeks before the commission issued a controversial letter requesting sweeping voter data from the states, co-chair Kris Kobach and the commission’s staff sought the input of Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams on “present and future” state data collection, and attached a draft of the letter for their review — at a moment when neither had yet been named to the commission. The commission’s letter requesting that data has been by far its most significant action since its formation in May — and was widely considered a fiasco. It sparked bipartisan criticism and multiple lawsuits. Yesterday, a federal court blocked the state of Texas from handing over its data due to privacy concerns.  

National: Russian propaganda may have been shared hundreds of millions of times, new research says | The Washington Post

Facebook has said ads bought by Russian operatives reached 10 million of its users. But does that include everyone reached by the information operation? Couldn’t the Russians also have created simple — and free — Facebook posts and hoped they went viral? And if so, how many times were these messages seen by Facebook’s massive user base? The answers to those questions, which social media analyst Jonathan Albright studied for a research document he posted online Thursday, are: No. Yes. And hundreds of millions — perhaps many billions — of times. “The primary push to influence wasn’t necessarily through paid advertising,” said Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “The best way to to understand this from a strategic perspective is organic reach.”

National: How Civil Rights Groups Are Fighting Trump’s Fraud Commission in Every State | Newsweek

Civil rights advocates have launched a direct attack on President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission in the form of a grassroots campaign aimed at increasing voter participation in all 50 states. Taking a step beyond simply responding to Trump-backed efforts to find voter fraud, the American Civil Liberties Union over the weekend kicked off a “Let People Vote” campaign in Lawrence, Kansas, the home state of Kris Kobach, who leads the controversial commission. The location wasn’t accidental.

National: Russian election meddling in 2018 may be difficult for Congress to stop | USA Today

With congressional elections just a year away, lawmakers are scrambling to stop Russia from hacking state election systems and using social media to create chaos and uncertainty among voters. But Congress may be stymied by its reluctance to regulate private tech companies and by states’ traditional aversion to any federal control over their elections, analysts say. The burden on the three congressional committees conducting investigations into Russian meddling has become much greater than simply trying to prevent Kremlin-linked groups from stealing campaign emails, as they allegedly did last year in cyber attacks against the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

National: DHS Creates Task Force To Bolster Election Security | Defense Daily Network

The Department of Homeland Security is upping its game to help state and local officials with strengthening the security of their election systems through the creation of a new task force, according to a senior department official. Last week the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate established an election task force that includes members from the different departments components, including the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, to work with state and local governments to help them protect their election systems, Christopher Krebs, the acting undersecretary of the NPPD, on Tuesday told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. Prior to the creation of the task force, the Office of Infrastructure Protection within NPPD was in charge of working with state and local governments to provide any help they needed with their election systems. Krebs said that elevating this role to a task force is comes down to “matching my words with our execution,” adding that the entity is being resourced “appropriately.”

National: Top Senate intelligence duo: Russia did interfere in 2016 election | The Guardian

The Senate intelligence committee has said it has confidence in an US agency finding earlier this year that Russia intervened in the US presidential election in an effort to skew the vote in Donald Trump’s favour. The committee chairman, Republican senator Richard Burr, said it remained an “open question” whether there was collusion by the Trump campaign with Moscow. But he added that Russian intelligence could threaten the next round of congressional elections next year. “We’ve got to make our facts, as it related to Russia’s involvement in our election, before the primaries getting started in 2018,” Burr said. “You can’t walk away from this and believe that Russia’s not currently active.” Burr said that the committee was making substantial progress in various areas of investigation.

National: Senator calls on voting machine makers to detail how they’ll prevent hacks | TechCrunch

One of the Senate’s main cybersecurity proponents wants assurances that voting systems in the U.S. are ready for their next major threat and he’s going straight to the hardware makers to get it. In a letter, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden — an outspoken member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — called on six of the main voting machine manufacturers in the U.S. to provide details about their cybersecurity efforts to date. The request comes on the heels of emerging details around Russia’s successful attempts to hack election systems in many states. Wyden’s line of inquiry is grounded in the pursuit of details, like if a company has been breached previously without reporting the incident and how often it has conducted penetration testing in cooperation with an external security firm. … Wyden’s appeal to voting machine manufacturers is the latest piece in the ongoing conversation around election system and voting machine security following revelations from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Because states handle elections in a variety of ways, implementing different styles of machine and overseeing their own voter rolls, just how airtight these systems are is difficult to assess.

National: Supreme Court shows divisions in Wisconsin redistricting case that could reshape U.S. politics | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

U.S. Supreme Court justices showed deep divisions Tuesday over a gerrymandering case from Wisconsin that could have far-reaching national implications. Liberal justices expressed openness to the idea that courts should intervene when lawmakers draw election maps that greatly favor their party. Conservatives were skeptical that judges could come up with a way to determine whether and when legislators had gone too far. In the middle of it all — as expected — was Justice Anthony Kennedy. Both sides see him as the one who will likely cast the deciding vote and they pitched their arguments to him. 

National: Supreme Court Appears Divided in Partisan Gerrymandering Case | Governing

A lawyer for Wisconsin Democrats, who have been shut out of power in the state since Republicans drew new election maps nearly a decade ago, pleaded with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to restrict partisan gerrymandering, the practice of one party using redistricting to give itself a political advantage. “The politicians are never going to fix gerrymandering,” Paul M. Smith, an attorney for the Campaign Legal Center, told the justices. “You are the only institution in the United States that can solve this problem.” Wisconsin Democrats say the 2011 Republican legislative map violated the First Amendment by punishing them for their political beliefs and violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause because it intended to dilute Democratic votes but not Republican ones.

National: Russian Hacking Fuels Return to Paper Ballots | Stateline

After the “hanging chad” fiasco during the 2000 presidential recount, many states and counties switched to electronic-only voting machines to modernize their systems. Now, amid security concerns over Russian hackers targeting state voting systems in last year’s election, there’s a renewed focus on shifting to paper ballots. In Virginia, election officials decided last month to stop using paperless touch-screen machines, in an effort to safeguard against unauthorized access to the equipment and improve the security of the state’s voting system. In Georgia, which uses electronic voting machines with no paper record, legislators are discussing getting rid of their aging equipment and using paper ballots instead. In a municipal election this November, officials will test a hybrid electronic-paper system. “States and counties were already moving toward paper ballots before 2016,” said Katy Owens Hubler, a consultant to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). “But the Russian hacking incident has brought the spotlight to this issue.”

National: Kennedy’s Vote Is in Play on Voting Maps Warped by Politics | The New York Times

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has long been troubled by extreme partisan gerrymandering, where the party in power draws voting districts to give itself a lopsided advantage in elections. But he has never found a satisfactory way to determine when voting maps are so warped by politics that they cross a constitutional line. After spirited Supreme Court arguments on Tuesday, there was reason to think Justice Kennedy may be ready to join the court’s more liberal members in a groundbreaking decision that could reshape American democracy by letting courts determine when lawmakers have gone too far. Justice Kennedy asked skeptical questions of lawyers defending a Wisconsin legislative map that gave Republicans many more seats in the State Assembly than their statewide vote tallies would have predicted. He asked no questions of the lawyer representing the Democratic voters challenging the map.

National: Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin | CNN

A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said. It has been unclear until now exactly which regions of the country were targeted by the ads. And while one source said that a large number of ads appeared in areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections, some clearly were geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds.

National: Russians took a page from corporate America by using Facebook tool to ID and influence voters | The Washington Post

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election. The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists. The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.

National: Facebook says up to 10m people saw ads bought by Russian agency | The Guardian

Facebook on Monday estimated that as many as 10 million people saw the political advertisements that were purchased by a shadowy Russian internet agency and ran on its platform. The company made the announcement after turning over 3,000 ads to congressional investigators examining Russian interference in the US election. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice-president of policy and communications, said the advertisements appeared to focus on “divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum, touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights”. Less than half of the ads were seen prior to the US election on 8 November, Schrage said in the post, while 56% were viewed afterward. And roughly a quarter of the ads were not seen by anyone. On 99% of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent, he said.

National: Facebook’s Russia-Linked Ads Came in Many Disguises | The New York Times

The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads. Federal investigators and officials at Facebook now believe these groups and their pages were part of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign linked to the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for spreading Kremlin-linked propaganda and fake news across the web. They were described to The New York Times by two people familiar with the social network and its ads who were not authorized to discuss them publicly. Under intensifying pressure from Congress and growing public outcry, Facebook on Monday turned over more than 3,000 of the Russia-linked advertisements from its site over to the Senate and House intelligence committees, as well as the Senate Judiciary Committee. The material is part of an attempt to learn the depth of what investigators now believe was a sprawling foreign effort spanning years to interfere with the 2016 United States presidential election.

“We’re obviously deeply disturbed by this,” Joel Kaplan, Facebook vice president for United States public policy, said in an interview. “The ads and accounts we found appeared to amplify divisive political issues across the political spectrum,” including gun rights, gay rights issues and the Black Lives Matter movement.

National: New Document Shows Inner Workings Of Trump’s Fraud Probe | HuffPost

President Donald Trump’s opaque voter fraud probe released the most comprehensive look at its inner workings to date in court documents Friday, providing a clearer sense of how it plans to use the voter data it has collected and raising new questions about its scope and goals. The commission’s work so far has been unclear; even some commissioners have said they’re not exactly sure what the panel is working on. Friday’s disclosure is significant because it shows officials on the probe have contacted officials with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the Social Security Administration ― which suggests the commission may be proceeding with a plan to compare the voter data it’s collected against federal databases. The commission is declining to release the email exchanges themselves, saying they are either administrative in nature or constitute individual research. Spokespeople for the commission, as well as for DOJ and the SSA, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

National: PSAs advise on protecting transgender Americans’ voting rights on Election Day | Wisconsin Gazette

The National Center for Transgender Equality and GLAAD have released a series of public service announcements advising on how transgender Americans can protect their right to vote on Election Day. The urgency of the PSAs is linked to new and stricter voter identification laws in some states. The announcements feature NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling, writer and advocate Janet Mock, actress Laverne Cox, performance artist Ignacio Rivera, Charles Meins and poet Kit Yan. They are part of a nationwide “Voting While Trans” campaign to raise awareness about the impact the photo ID laws may have on thousands of transgender Americans this November. 

National: DHS is standing by its initial assessment that 21 states were targeted | HuffPost

Top election officials in two states say the Department of Homeland Security gave them faulty information last week when it said Russian hackers scanned their election systems last year. The accusations underscore the persistent barriers in information sharing as the federal government and states try to respond to hacking in last year’s election. DHS informed election officials in 21 states on Friday that Russian hackers had tried to access voter information, the first time many states found out they had been targeted. DHS has faced criticism for being slow to share information with states. Now election officials in Wisconsin and California say DHS has provided them with additional information showing that Russian hackers actually scanned networks at other state agencies unconnected to voter data. In Wisconsin, DHS told officials on Tuesday that hackers had scanned an IP address belonging to the Department of Workforce Development, not the Wisconsin Elections Commission. … Scott McConnell, a DHS spokesman, said in a statement the agency stood by its assessment that 21 states were targeted by Russian hackers last year. He suggested hackers still could have targeted election records, even if they did not target the IP addresses of the state’s election body.

National: Trump administration furthers states’ frustration over election hacking | CNN

Tension between state election officials and the Trump administration is only growing after two states say they were misinformed by the Department of Homeland Security about Russian government-linked hacking, further prolonging a months-long dispute over delayed information from the federal government. California and Wisconsin say DHS was incorrect in its initial assessment that their states’ systems connected to election administration were targeted by Russian hackers. The latest flap started September 22, when the Department of Homeland Security sought to notify state election officials on whether their states were among those targeted during last year’s presidential election. DHS previously said that 21 states’ election-related systems had been targeted — but had never said which ones were on the list. By Wednesday, DHS had to revise its alerts to both California and Wisconsin.

National: Google Prepares to Brief Congress on Its Role in Election | The New York Times

Google has become the latest Silicon Valley giant to become entangled in a widening investigation into how online social networks and technology products may have played a role in Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Friday evening, Google said it would cooperate with congressional inquiries into the election, days after Facebook and Twitter provided evidence to investigators of accounts on their networks that were linked to Russian groups. Google was called to testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Nov. 1. Google has also begun an internal investigation into whether its advertising products and services were used as part of a Russia-linked influence campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously because they were not permitted to speak publicly about the issue. Exactly when the inquiry began is not known, but it has been discussed inside Google over recent weeks, the person said. The Wall Street Journal reported the internal investigation earlier.