National: What the Russian Facebook Ads Reveal | The Atlantic

The news that Facebook ran tens of thousands of dollars worth of ads from a Putin-linked Russian troll farm is the latest evidence that the Kremlin has proved adept at turning those features of the American system it most detests into advantages for itself. Although Putin is an apostle of illiberalism, he has picked up on U.S. freedom of the press as a useful tool for Russian messages. In this case, propagandists for the nationalist Russian state are working to turn America’s diversity against it, using potent wedge issues to create and widen social fissures. Foreigners are prohibited from spending to influence an election, so there could be a violation of law and Federal Election Commission guidelines, but it’s not like Russia is going to extradite anyone to the U.S. to face campaign-finance charges. The ads could only be further evidence of Russian attempts to interfere in the election, which at this point is acknowledged by nearly everyone save the president. But if, as Senator Mark Warner and others have implied, the Russians might have received guidance on who to target with the ads, it might point closer to the elusive smoking gun proving collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. There’s also no way to know whether the estimated $100,000 buy, a relative pittance by campaign-spending standards, is the end of the splurge or just the start.

National: Republicans split over gerrymandering case headed to Supreme Court | The Washington Post

A long list of prominent Republicans is urging the Supreme Court to find that extreme partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, saying the practice of drawing electoral lines to benefit one party or another is detrimental to democracy. It puts those Republicans on opposing sides from groups such as the Republican National Committee and the party’s congressional campaign committee, which are supporting Wisconsin’s GOP-led legislature in a major high court case to be heard next month. A lower court found lawmakers drew maps that so favored Republican candidates that they violated the constitutional right of equal protection.

National: Prominent Republicans Urge Supreme Court to End Gerrymandering | The New York Times

Breaking ranks with many of their fellow Republicans, a group of prominent politicians filed briefs on Tuesday urging the Supreme Court to rule that extreme political gerrymandering — the drawing of voting districts to give lopsided advantages to the party in power — violates the Constitution. The briefs were signed by Republicans including Senator John McCain of Arizona; Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio; Bob Dole, the former Republican Senate leader from Kansas and the party’s 1996 presidential nominee; the former senators John C. Danforth of Missouri, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming; and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a former governor of California. “Partisan gerrymandering has become a tool for powerful interests to distort the democratic process,” reads a brief filed by Mr. McCain and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case, Gill v. Whitford, No. 16-1161, on Oct. 3.

National: Postal woes demand jump in stamp price to 60 cents | Associated Press

The Postal Service is currently petitioning the agency that oversees it, the Postal Regulatory Commission, to grant the biggest change to its pricing system in a half century: the authority to lift a cap on postal rates. The commission’s decision is expected within weeks. If the Postal Service gets the ability to raise rates, it could add substantially to the cost of mailing prescription drugs and magazines, for example. Packaging and bulk-mail rates also would be affected, straining tight budgets for an increasing number of state and local governments that distribute election ballots by mail. Colorado, Oregon and Washington conduct elections almost entirely by mail, while California is making the switch and will fully do so beginning with the 2020 elections. Most other states also mail out ballots as a part of early voting. Ballots are typically distributed via bulk mail and returned by voters with first-class postage.

National: Trump fraud commission violated federal rules, lawsuit claims | The Hill

President Trump’s voter fraud commission may have violated federal records laws by using personal email accounts to conduct commission work. The lawsuit brought by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law against the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity states that Justice Department attorneys revealed during a Sept. 1 meeting that commission members have been using personal email accounts rather than federal government-issued accounts to conduct commission-related work. The Verge was the first to report on the latest filing. “Such use of personal email violates the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which Congress amended in 2014 specifically to require that all persons covered by the PRA — including members of this Commission — use official federal government email to conduct government business,” the Lawyer’s Committee argued in a joint status report filed by attorneys for both parties in the suit.

National: Facebook says likely Russia-based group paid for political ads during US election | The Guardian

Facebook said on Wednesday that it had found that an influence operation likely based in Russia spent $100,000 on ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May. The social media network said that many of the ads promoted 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages that it has now suspended. The ads spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights, instead of backing a particular political candidate, it said.  Facebook announced the findings in a blog post by its chief security officer, Alex Stamos, and said that it was cooperating with federal inquiries into influence operations during the 2016 US presidential election.

National: America is Not Ready for Another Attack on Elections | Newsweek

The United States remains woefully unprepared for an attack on its nationwide elections system, seven months after the 2016 presidential campaign season was consumed by Russia’s multipronged attempts to undermine democracy by damaging Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Just six of the 10 states that requested additional money to firm up cybersecurity at their election agencies are expecting to receive it, Politico reported Tuesday, while 21 states have called on new federal funding to strengthen local election security or replace outdated voting machines susceptible to hacking and intrusion.

National: Lawyers’ Group: Sketchy Election Panel Using Personal Email For Official Business | TPM

Members of President Donald Trump’s bogus “election integrity” commission vice chaired by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) used personal email to conduct official business, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the commission claimed Tuesday. The claims appeared in a joint status report filed by both sides Tuesday in the case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Members of the panel “have been using personal email accounts rather than federal government systems to conduct Commission work,” according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which filed suit against the committee in July.

National: Is the Electoral College Doomed? | Politico

The Electoral College is under fresh assault on the heels of Donald Trump’s victory last November—the second time in five presidential races the popularly elected candidate lost the election—but it’s not due to any groundswell in Congress for a constitutional amendment to adopt a national popular vote. Instead, the most viable campaign to change how Americans choose their leader is being waged at booze-soaked junkets in luxury hotels around the country and even abroad, as an obscure entity called the Institute for Research on Presidential Elections peddles a controversial idea: that state legislatures can put the popular-vote winner in the White House.

National: Should states make presidential candidates release taxes? | Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s refusal to publicly release his tax returns is fueling initiatives in Massachusetts and other states that would require presidential candidates to disclose their personal finances before they could appear on the ballot. Massachusetts lawmakers are set to hold a hearing Wednesday at the Statehouse on a bill that would impose those conditions. The chief sponsor, state Sen. Mike Barrett, said that until the election of Trump, most Americans just assumed candidates for president would adhere to “modern practices of disclosure and transparency” — even those that are unwritten. “One of them is the disclosure by candidates of personal financial information related to possible conflicts of interest,” the Lexington Democrat said. “The 2016 election shattered our confidence in the broad acceptance by presidential candidates of certain rules of public conduct.”

National: Evidence of Russian Election-Data Tampering Mounts as Urgency to Investigate It Does Not | Slate

Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election directly at the ballot box may have been more aggressive than we previously understood. The New York Times published an alarming investigation on Friday about hackers’ efforts to tamper with electoral systems and the government’s surprising lack of response to the threat. The article builds on revelations reported by the Intercept in June that Russia’s military intelligence agency had breached VR Systems, a company that provides electronic poll books to counties in eight states, beginning in August 2016. Hackers infiltrated at least two other unnamed companies providing essential election apparatuses like voter databases and registration operations in the months leading up to November, anonymous intelligence officials told the Times, and election systems in at least 21 states had been targeted. (In June, Bloomberg reported that Russian hackers had accessed election-related systems in 39 states. It’s unclear why the Times now estimates fewer states were penetrated.)

National: Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny | The New York Times

The calls started flooding in from hundreds of irate North Carolina voters just after 7 a.m. on Election Day last November. Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours. Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before. “It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,” Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

National: Electronic voting systems in the U.S. need post-election audits | TechTarget

The state of Colorado has taken a step toward rebuilding public trust in the election system in the United States.

Beginning in November 2017, Colorado will require risk-limiting audits, or RLAs, in elections statewide. The state has always required traditional post-election audits, but in 2009, a law passed requiring RLAs throughout Colorado. According to the statute, an RLA is “an audit protocol that makes use of statistical methods and is designed to limit acceptable levels of risk of certifying a preliminary election outcome that constitutes an incorrect outcome.” This means that all post-election audits in the state of Colorado compare a random sample of paper ballots to their digital counterparts. Colorado’s law is, in large part, a reaction to recent events in the U.S. and across the globe that have called the security of electronic voting systems into question and emphasized the importance of election audits for all levels of elections.

National: Adam Schiff pushes to defund Trump’s voter fraud commission | The Hill

A Democratic lawmaker has introduced an amendment to an upcoming government spending bill that would defund President Trump’s controversial commission on voter fraud. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) announced the amendment in a press release this week that accuses the panel co-chaired by Vice President Pence of “appearing to lay the groundwork for a push to place new restrictions on voting that disproportionately disadvantages minority voters.” “This commission is an effort to validate the President’s repeated and baseless claim that millions of fraudulent ballots were cast in the 2016 election, and I fear it lays the groundwork for new efforts to make it more difficult to vote across the country,” Schiff said in the statement.

National: Judge Nails Trump’s Fraud Commission on Records Handling | Courthouse News

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to show more evidence that a new commission tasked with investigating election fraud is complying with public-disclosure laws. The order this morning came as part of a demand by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for limited discovery after the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity failed to release all of the materials it used during its first meeting on July 19. Despite having promised to release all materials before the meeting even occurred, the commission explained in a July 31 opposition brief that it could not do so because certain commission members did not submit their materials in advance.

National: Patent suit pits top two players in U.S. electronic voting machines against each other | IPWatchdog

On Monday, August 21st, Omaha, NE-based voting machine firm Election Systems & Software filed a patent infringement suit against election product company Dominion Voting Systems of Toronto, Ontario. Election Systems is asserting a patent on an electronic voting machine technology that provides multiple methods by which a user may cast a vote in an effort to improve accessibility. The suit has been filed in the District of Delaware. Election Systems is asserting a single patent in the case: U.S. Patent No. 8991701, titled Integrated Voting System and Method for Accommodating Paper Ballots and Audio Ballots and issued to the firm in March 2015. It claims an accessible voting station for use during an election having a voting console to present an audio ballot to a voter and receive voting selections from the voter, a printer to print a ballot including the selections and a reader that scans a portion of the printed ballot to determine voting selections.

National: Trump fraud panel apologizes after judge calls failure to disclose information ‘incredible’ | The Washington Post

A federal judge on Wednesday tore into President Trump’s voter commission for reneging on a promise to fully disclose public documents before a July 19 meeting, ordering the government to meet new transparency requirements and eliciting an apology from administration lawyers. U.S. District Judge Colleen ­Kollar-Kotelly of Washington said the Election Integrity Commission released only an agenda and proposed bylaws before its first meeting at the White House complex last month. But once gathered, commissioners had thick binders that included documents the public had not seen, including a specially prepared report and a 381-page “database” purporting to show 1,100 cases of voter fraud, both from the think tank Heritage Foundation. The group also received a typed list of possible topics to address from the panel vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach.

National: Cyber experts were blocked in their push to patch voting systems in 2016 | McClatchy

They knew Russian operatives might try to tamper with the nation’s electronic voting systems. Many people inside the U.S. government and the Obama White House knew. In the summer of 2016, a cluster of volunteers on a federally supervised cybersecurity team crafting 2018 election guidelines felt compelled to do something sooner. Chatting online, they scrambled to draw up ways for state and local officials to patch the most obvious cyber vulnerabilities before Election Day 2016. Their five-page list of recommendations focused on two gaping holes in the U.S. election system. It warned that internet voting by at least some citizens in 32 states was not secure and should be avoided. And, critically, it advised how to guard voting and ballot-counting machines that the experts knew could be penetrated even when disconnected from the internet. But the list was stopped in its tracks. A year later, even as U.S. intelligence agencies warn that Russian operatives have their eyes on 2018 and beyond, America’s more than 7,000 election jurisdictions nationwide still do not have access to those guidelines for shielding the voting process.

National: President Trump’s cybersecurity advisers resign with dire warning | Metro US

Eight advisers on President Trump’s cybersecurity team have resigned, leaving behind a scathing message for him: He has “given insufficient attention to the growing threats” facing the United States, and his inaction has “threatened the security of the homeland.” The advisers comprised more than one-quarter of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC). The 28-member panel, established in 2001 and drawn from the private sector, government and academia, advises the Department of Homeland Security on cybersecurity and infrastructure protection. They excoriated Trump on those fronts, saying he has failed to be “adequately attentive to the pressing national security matters” or “responsive to sound advice received from experts.” Those departing experts cited the president’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, in which he defended white supremacists, his withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and his inaction on safeguarding the U.S. election system after the Russian attacks on the 2016 election.

National: In one corner of the Internet, the 2016 Democratic primary never ended | The Washington Post

On Friday afternoon, a judge in South Florida dismissed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, brought by people who accused it of committing fraud during the 2016 primary to the detriment of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). Neither the DNC nor ousted chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) responded to the dismissal when asked to comment. Within hours, the attorneys who bought the suit, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, were providing updates on the case to the blogger and fantasy author H.A. Goodman. Calling out the people and outlets who they believe had covered them unfairly, the Becks described a legal system so corrupt that there could be no fair accounting for what the DNC did. It would be up to alternative media to get the truth out. “This population has been battered by propaganda, and misinformation, and corrupt politicians for so long,” Jared Beck said. “If you go into court, and you represent anyone but a rich person or a powerful corporation, the chances of you having a fair day in court are slim to none.”

National: Kobach Swipes at Schumer Over Charlottesville | Roll Call

The vice chair of a presidential commission charged with investigating voting fraud swung back at the Democratic leader of the Senate Friday, saying it was “pathetic” that Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer equated the panel with white supremacists and a deadly rally earlier this month in Charlottesville, Virginia. “It’s a pathetic, partisan attempt to wrap Charlottesville around every issue he can think of,” said Kris Kobach, the vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. “It’s complete nonsense.” On Thursday, Schumer, a Democrat from New York, posted a piece on Medium.com calling for President Donald Trump to disband the commission. He also said if Trump failed to do so, Congress should consider attaching riders to “must-pass” legislation in September that would prohibit the panel’s operation.

National: How secure are America’s voting machines? | PRI

At a recent DefCon security conference, organizers wanted to test how voting machines could be hacked. The result? It took just 90 minutes for the hackers to get into the machines. Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, in Washington, DC, says the hack took that long only because the individual had to leave the facility to go buy a USB keyboard. “When he came back, there were two open USB ports on the back of this machine, which was a decertified AVS WINVote,” Hall explains. “He did the ‘three-fingered salute’— the Windows control-alt-delete — and it dropped to Task Manager. Then he could load whatever he wanted. They installed Winamp and played the now-famous Rick Astley song, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’” Some of the machines the hackers “attacked” are still in use, but for the most part, they were purchased on eBay or GovDeals (the government version of eBay), Hall says. Most were two or three years old and not running the most current software. Nevertheless, the experiment exposed serious flaws in virtually every type of machine.

National: U.S. state election officials still in the dark on Russian hacking | Reuters

The federal government has not notified U.S. state election officials if their voting systems were targeted by suspected Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign, and the information will likely never be made public, a top state election chief told Reuters. “You’re absolutely never going to learn it, because we don’t even know it,” Judd Choate, state election director for Colorado and president of the National Association of State Election Directors, said in an interview on Thursday during the group’s summer conference. Nearly 10 months after Republican Donald Trump’s upset presidential victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, Choate said he had not spoken to a single state election director who had been told by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security if their state was among those attacked. The lack of information-sharing on the election breaches reflects the difficulty state and federal officials have had in working together to protect U.S. voting from cyber threats. All U.S. elections are run by state and local governments, which have varying degrees of technical competence.

National: My Conversation With a Leading Election Technology Researcher Should Terrify You | Patriot NOT Partisan

Def Con is a 25 year old hacking convention where the worlds best hackers come together often highlighting security vulnerabilities in technology. This year, Def Con made news by raising awareness of our voting machine insecurities by challenging hackers to hack into the voting machines commonly used in this country for elections. These Def Con hacks took place in the “Voting Village”. I spoke with Voting Village organizer and leading election technology researcher, Harri Hursti, about the results of the experiment and the challenges we face in securing our elections in the future.

AM: Tell me about Def Con and the “Voting Village” and the role you played in the experiment.

HH: I was the co-organizer of the Village along with professor Matt Blaze.

AM: What was the main purpose of this exhibition?

HH: Education. We wanted to let the security community learn more about the machines and the designs. So far, only a very small group of people have been allowed to study and research these machines. As a result there was a lot of misinformation, rumors and false claims, and finding proven facts was difficult. The broader community which has 1st hand experience can help the public and the policy makers to get the facts known and drive better policies and practices to secure the elections.

National: Vote Fraud Crusader J. Christian Adams Sparks Outrage | NBC

J. Christian Adams claims there’s an “alien invasion” at the voting booth. Adams, a member of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, is dedicating his life to cleaning up registration rolls around the country and trying to prevent non-citizens from casting ballots. To do so, he’s spent years suing counties to force them to purge their rolls and he’s published personal information online about thousands of registered voters he believes could have committed fraud. Adams has turned allegations of sweeping, illegal voting into a career marked by frequent litigation and a bombastic media presence — calling critics who say that there’s no widespread proof of voter fraud “flat-earthers.”

National: Kander says courts can’t be counted on to save voting rights in Trump era | The Kansas City Star

Former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander told a crowd of people at a progressive event in Parkville Saturday that they can’t just rely on the courts to protect voting rights under President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Kander, a Democrat, said that with Trump appointing judges and Sessions running the U.S. Department of Justice, voting rights cases will become tougher to win. Legal challenges have to be paired with political activism. “I believe there should be political consequences for politicians who commit voter suppression,” Kander said. “I believe that if you make it harder to vote, then we should make it harder for you to get reelected.” Kander, who started a political action committee this year called Let America Vote, spoke at a “voting rights festival” hosted at English Landing Park by Northland Progress. The festival is part of the group’s “In for 10” campaign, in which volunteers pledge to help at least 10 Missouri citizens register to vote.

National: Florida judge dismisses fraud lawsuit against DNC | The Washington Post

A year-long legal battle over the Democratic National Committee’s handling of the 2016 presidential primary came to an end Friday, with a federal judge in Florida dismissing a class-action suit brought by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC’s internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary,” Judge William Zloch, a Reagan appointee, wrote in his dismissal. “To the extent Plaintiffs have asserted specific causes of action grounded in specific factual allegations, it is this Court’s emphatic duty to measure Plaintiffs’ pleadings against existing legal standards. Having done so . . . the Court finds that the named Plaintiffs have not presented a case that is cognizable in federal court.”

National: Many County Election Officials Still Lack Cybersecurity Training | NBC

Despite Russia’s attempt to hack the 2016 U.S. election and the voter registration systems of 21 states, an NBC News investigation reveals that election officials in the most heavily populated counties of three crucial swing states still haven’t received formal training on how to detect and fight attacks. Election officials in three of Pennsylvania’s four biggest counties — Philadelphia, Allegheny and Bucks, which together account for nearly a third of the state’s voters — told NBC News they never received cybersecurity training, which experts say is crucial for officials to identify risks. NBC reached out to election officials in every county in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan and got responses from 60 percent of the counties. Officials from all 15 Arizona counties responded, but only five said their officials had received cybersecurity training. In Pennsylvania, where 42 of 67 counties responded, eight counties said their workers had training. In Michigan, 40 of the state’s 83 counties responded, and only 12 indicated receiving formal training.

National: Proposed legislation discourages Russia-U.S. cyber pact, while prioritizing election security | SC Magazine

A U.S. intelligence bill that recently passed committee in the Senate contains key provisions designed to defend the electoral process from Russian meddling and other foreign interference, as well as curtail any possible White House effort to form a joint cybersecurity unit with the Kremlin. Passed in the Senate Intelligence Committee by a 14-1 margin this past July and made public just days ago, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal year 2018 explicitly forbids the U.S. government from using federal resources to form a cyber partnership with Russia, unless the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) first submits a report that congressional intelligence committee members can review 30 days in advance of such an agreement. This key clause is a blatant rebuke of President Donald Trump, who fleetingly announced a U.S.-Russian cyber unit in July before backing off the idea amidst backlash.