National: Can Geometry Fix Partisan Gerrymandering? | Bowdoin News

A mathematician and a political scientist joined forces this week to give a two-part talk at Bowdoin about gerrymandering, which is the practice of redrawing congressional districts to help ensure partisan outcomes. Though gerrymandering lands squarely in the political realm, math has always played a big role in congressional districting. Math determines how the U.S. counts voters in its Census and how those voters get divided up to apportion representatives to the government. And today, math could possibly lead the way to a more fair and just political system that is based on mathematically derived voting districts, according to an academic who visited Bowdoin this week. Moon Duchin, an associate professor of mathematics at Tufts University, gave a talk Monday evening about how she is applying her expertise in the geometry of groups and surfaces to gerrymandering. “We’re looking at aspects of this big mess that is US congressional and legislative redistricting, and trying to find places where math has something to say,” she said.

National: Paper ballots are back in vogue thanks to Russian hacking fears | USA Today

Once about as newsworthy as water meters, the voting machines and computers used to record and tally the nation's ballots are suddenly a hot button issue due to mounting evidence Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. According to the FBI, as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned or targeted by Russia. There's no evidence of votes changed. But given the stakes, some state agencies that run elections are trying to curb any further interference prior to mid-term elections in November. Their tool of choice: Ensuring systems can't be hacked, and if they are, making those breaches immediately obvious. To do this, some are taking the unusual move of rewinding the technological dial, debating measures that would add paper ballots — similar to how many Americans voted before electronic voting started to become widespread in the 1980s. 

National: Huntsman Says ‘No Question’ Russia Meddled in U.S. Election | Bloomberg

Jon Huntsman, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Russia, took a firm stance against Russia and its interference in the 2016 presidential election during his confirmation hearing Tuesday. “There is no question -- underline no question -- that the Russia government interfered with the U.S. election last year and Moscow continues to meddle in processes of our friends and allies,” Huntsman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his opening statement. Trump has at times questioned the finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia was behind the interference in an effort to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton and ultimately help him win the White House.

National: Political campaigns prep for battle with hackers | Politico

Candidates are quizzing prospective campaign managers on anti-hacking plans. Democratic committees like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which was breached last year, have switched internally from email to encrypted messaging apps. And both parties are feverishly trying to spread advice and best practices to new campaigns before they become targets. The political world is officially obsessed with cybersecurity in 2017 — especially the Democrats burned by the hacking of their committees and operatives during the 2016 election. Much of the Democratic Party’s permanent apparatus has already changed its day-to-day operations as a result, while beginning the slow process of persuading its decentralized, startup-like campaign ecosystem to follow suit.

National: Trump Nominee to FEC Tried to Shred Texas’ Already-Weak Ethics Laws | Texas Observer

In yet another case of the cosmic satire in which we live hitting its mark a little too hard on the nose, the Trump administration last week nominated Texas lawyer Trey Trainor to a seat on the Federal Election Commission, an agency that’s supposed to enforce and interpret campaign finance laws. Trainor is notable mainly for his general opposition to campaign finance laws, so his nomination makes sense, in that most of Trump’s appointees so far either hate or are ignorant of the thing they’re expected to oversee. But Trainor’s nomination also provided an opportunity to make note, once again, of the similarities between Texas’ screwed-up politics and the nation’s increasingly screwed-up politics. If you haven’t heard of Trainor, you’re not alone — he’s well-known around the Capitol, but he’s a behind-the-scenes guy. His name rarely pops up in news stories.

National: Trump using campaign, RNC funds to pay legal bills from Russia probe: sources | Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump is using money donated to his re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee to pay for his lawyers in the probe of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Following Reuters exclusive report on Tuesday, CNN reported that the Republican National Committee paid in August more than $230,000 to cover some of Trump’s legal fees related to the probe. RNC spokesperson Cassie Smedile confirmed to Reuters that Trump’s lead lawyer, John Dowd, received $100,000 from the RNC and that the RNC also paid $131,250 to the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, the law firm where Jay Sekulow, another of Trump’s lawyers, is a partner. The RNC is scheduled to disclose its August spending on Wednesday. The Trump campaign is due for a disclosure on Oct. 15.

National: Yes, U.S. election integrity could be improved. Here’s why the Pence commission probably won’t do it. | The Washington Post

In May, President Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate electoral fraud in last November’s election, appointing Vice President Pence as its head. While the president has repeatedly argued that millions of unauthorized voters cast ballots, political scientists have debunked his claims. Experts do believe that the quality of elections in the United States could improve. But the Pence commission is unusual in several ways that may prevent that improvement. Here’s what the United States could learn from how other countries reduce electoral law violations, maintain accurate voter rolls, improve voter registration and ensure that voter’s choices are reliably recorded. The Pence commission’s objective is to evaluate the strengths and vulnerabilities of the voting process. Its first task, however, has been to investigate Trump’s contention that millions of illegal votes were cast last November.

National: Is Kobach a private citizen when serving on Trump commission? | The Kansas City Star

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s use of private email for a presidential commission could bring him into conflict with a 1-year-old state law meant to increase government transparency. Kobach, a candidate for Kansas governor, told ProPublica last week that he was serving on President Donald Trump’s voting fraud commission as a private citizen rather than as Kansas secretary of state and that he was using his personal gmail account for commission business rather than his official state account. Kobach, a candidate for Kansas governor and vice chair of the commission, said using his state account would be a “waste of state resources.” The ProPublica report scrutinized the use of private email by commission members and their possible violation of a federal statute that requires any federal government business conducted by private email to be forwarded to a government address within 20 days. But Kobach may also be running afoul of a state law, enacted last year, that made Kansas officials’ private emails subject to the Kansas Open Records Act, or KORA, if they pertained to public business.

National: Trump’s fraud commission proves a magnet for controversy | The Washington Post

As President Trump’s voter fraud commission prepared to convene in New Hampshire this week, it already faced questions about its seriousness of purpose and whether it was a hopelessly biased endeavor. Then things got worse. An email surfaced in which the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, one of the commission’s most conservative members, lamented that Trump was appointing Democrats and “mainstream” Republicans to the bipartisan panel. Its vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), drew rebukes from voting rights advocates — and a couple of fellow commissioners — for an article he wrote for the hard-right Breitbart News website. The article asserted, without proof, that voter fraud had likely changed the result in New Hampshire’s most recent U.S. Senate race. A third Republican on the panel, J. Christian Adams of Virginia, later feuded on Twitter with a journalist, questioning whether she had lied about her academic credentials. She had not.

National: Senators propose 9/11-style commission on Russian interference | The Hill

A bipartisan pair of senators is moving to create a 9/11-style commission to examine the cyberattacks that took place during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced legislation on Friday to establish the National Commission on Cybersecurity of U.S. Election Systems to study the election-related cyberattacks — which the intelligence community has attributed to Russia — and make recommendations on how to guard against such activity going forward. The commission would be modeled after the 9/11 Commission tasked with investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States.

National: Experts Say the Use of Private Email by Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Isn’t Legal | ProPublica

President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission came under fire earlier this month when a lawsuit and media reports revealed that the commissioners were using private emails to conduct public business. Commission co-chair Kris Kobach confirmed this week that most of them continue to do so. Experts say the commission’s email practices do not appear to comport with federal law. “The statute here is clear,” said Jason Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration. Essentially, Baron said, the commissioners have three options: 1. They can use a government email address; 2. They can use a private email address but copy every message to a government account; or 3. They can use a private email address and forward each message to a government account within 20 days. According to Baron, those are the requirements of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, which the commission must comply with under its charter.

National: Facebook under fire over Russian ads in election | The Hill

Facebook is under fire after revealing that a Russian group tied to the Kremlin bought political ads on its platform during the 2016 elections. Lawmakers are demanding answers, and liberal groups, who say the company failed to crack down on fake news, are seizing on the new disclosure. Even Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, has cited the ads when discussing her loss during a book tour. "We now know that they were sewing discord during the election with phony groups on Facebook," Clinton told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. "They were running anti-immigrant, anti-me, anti-Hillary Clinton demonstrations. They were putting out the fake news and negative stories untrue to really divide people." Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said the company needs to be more forthcoming about the full extent of the ad buys.

National: Voting machines can be hacked without evidence, commission is told | Washington Times

The country’s voting machines are susceptible to hacking, which could be done in a way so that it leaves no fingerprints, making it impossible to know whether the outcome was changed, computer experts told President Trump’s voter integrity commission Tuesday. The testimony marked a departure for the commission, which was formed to look into fraud and barriers to voting, but which heard that a potentially greater threat to confidence in American elections is the chance for enemy actors to meddle. “There’s no perfect security; there’s only degrees of insecurity,” said Ronald Rivest, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said hackers have myriad ways of attacking voting machines. “You don’t want to rest the election of the president on, ‘Maybe the Wi-Fi was turned on when it shouldn’t have been.’” He and two other computer security experts said bar codes on ballots and smartphones in voting locations could give hackers a chance to rewrite results in ways that couldn’t be traceable, short of sampling of ballots or hand recounts — and those work only in cases where there’s a paper trail.

National: Bipartisan Push for Electoral Security Gets Priority Status | Roll Call

A bipartisan effort to enhance election security is among the priorities for Senate Democrats as part of the debate on the annual defense authorization measure. “The consensus of 17 U.S. Intelligence agencies was that Russia, a foreign adversary, interfered in our elections. Make no mistake: Their success in 2016 will encourage them to try again,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Tuesday. “We have state elections in a couple of months and the 2018 election is a little more than a year away. We must improve our defenses now to ensure we’re prepared.” The New York Democrat was speaking on the floor about a bipartisan effort led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.

National: Top state officials join bipartisan fight against election hacking | Politico

Two months after the campaign managers for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney helped launch an effort to assist campaigns in preventing future cyberattacks, four secretaries of state have signed on to work on their project. Republicans Mac Warner of West Virginia and Tom Schedler of Louisiana, and Democrats Denise Merrill of Connecticut and Nellie Gorbea of Rhode Island, are now participating in the effort to create a non-partisan playbook for campaigns. The project is in part fueled by the presidential campaign experiences of Robby Mook and Matt Rhoades, both of whom managed campaigns that fell victim to hacking by foreign entities. Mook and Rhoades have been in touch with a number of campaigns this year but won’t identify them because of the sensitivity of the issue.

National: America’s shameful history of voter suppression | Andrew Gumbel/The Guardian

When Kris Kobach was first running for office in Kansas in 2010, he claimed he’d found evidence that thousands of Kansans were assuming the identities of dead voters and casting fraudulent ballots – a technique once known as ghost voting. Kobach even offered a name, Albert K Brewer of Wichita, who he said had voted from beyond the grave in the primaries that year. But then it emerged that Albert K Brewer, aged 78, was still very much alive, a registered Republican like Kobach, and more than a little stunned to be told he’d moved on to the great hereafter. No evidence emerged that anyone had ghost voted in Kansas that year. Seven years on, as Donald Trump’s point man on reforming the US electoral system, Kobach has not backed away from those same scare tactics – no matter that he is frequently called a fraud and a liar, and his allegations entirely baseless. On the contrary. Backed by a president who, days after assuming office, claimed that 3 to 5 million fraudulent ballots had been cast for Hillary Clinton, Kobach is enthusiastically spreading stories of voter impersonation on a massive scale, of out-of-state students voting twice, and of non-citizens casting illegal ballots.

National: Democrats on Voter Fraud Panel Join Those Criticizing It | The New York Times

President Trump’s voter fraud commission met in New Hampshire on Tuesday to discuss what members characterized as declining confidence in elections. But the most telling discussions of the session addressed declining confidence in the commission itself. As protesters outside the meeting accused the panel of promoting voter suppression, New Hampshire Secretary of State William M. Gardner, a Democrat on the commission, warned that “the specter of extreme political partisanship” threatened to undermine whatever work it was doing. And Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, another Democrat on the commission, dressed down the commission’s Republican vice chairman for what he called reckless statements about supposed voter fraud in New Hampshire.

National: Kobach comes under fire as panel meets in New Hampshire | The Washington Post

President Trump’s “election integrity” commission, a source of roiling controversy since its inception, convened here Tuesday amid fresh discord over an unfounded assertion by its vice chairman that the result of New Hampshire’s Senate election last year “likely” changed because of voter fraud. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) largely defended an article published Friday in which he pointed to statistics showing that more than 6,000 people had voted in a close election here using out-of-state driver’s licenses to prove their identity. He suggested that was evidence of people taking advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and heading to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes. New Hampshire only requires voters to state their “domicile,” a looser standard than residency, and college students and others routinely vote without state-issued driver’s licenses.

National: Kobach: Commission may not recommend changes | Associated Press

The vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s commission on election fraud on Tuesday dismissed criticism that the panel is bent on voter suppression, saying there is a “high possibility” it will make no recommendations when it finishes its work — and even if it does, it can’t force states to adopt them. Trump, a Republican, created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May to investigate his unsubstantiated claims that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. Democrats have blasted the commission as a biased panel determined to curtail voting rights, and they ramped up their criticism ahead of and during the group’s daylong meeting in New Hampshire. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, said some voters have canceled their registrations or been hesitant to register since learning the group has asked state governments to provide data on individual voters. “Their voting suppression impact has already begun,” he said on a press call organized by the Democratic National Committee.

National: Donald Trump May Restrict Voting Rights Ahead of 2020 | Newsweek

A member of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was pushing fake news before its second meeting was even able to kick off on Tuesday afternoon. In an op-ed published by Breitbart just ahead of the meeting, Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman, again asserted a debunked claim that more than 5,000 people in New Hampshire cast illegal votes during last year’s election. His suggestion that there was rampant voter fraud in the region was swiftly rebuked by the state’s secretary of state, Bill Gardner, who said New Hampshire’s election results were “real and valid.” By the end of the day, though, it became clear that several of the group’s members have a common goal: to publicize every known case of voter fraud from before and during the 2016 election and to clamp down on anything that made them possible ahead of the 2020 vote.

National: Texas lawyer Trey Trainor nominated for Federal Election Commission | The Texas Tribune

President Donald Trump is nominating Trey Trainor, an Austin lawyer well-known in Texas politics, to serve on the Federal Election Commission. The White House announced Trainor's appointment late Tuesday night. He must be confirmed by the Senate. Trainor is a longtime attorney specializing in election law, campaign finance and ethics. He has served as the lawyer for the conservative nonprofit Empower Texans, defending it during its long-running battles with the Texas Ethics Commission over whether it should have to disclose its donors. Trainor originally supported U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the 2016 presidential primary, but once Cruz dropped out, Trainor helped pave the way for Trump's nomination at the Republican National Convention. Trainor served as general counsel to the RNC platform committee, a job that put him on the front lines of the party's efforts to quell an anti-Trump uprising on the floor.

National: Elections Assistance Commission Approves New Voluntary Voting System Guidelines | FCW

A new set of voluntary guidelines for security and reliability of elections systems was approved on Sept. 12 by a key committee of the Elections Assistance Commission. The vote took place at a meeting of the EAC that was chaired by Kent Rochford, acting director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The new document represents a refresh of voting system guidelines that were developed in 2005 and last updated in 2015. The EAC vote comes as cybersecurity experts warn that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, and almost a year after the Department of Homeland Security added election systems to its list of critical U.S. infrastructure.

National: After 2016 Election Hacks, Some States Return to Paper Ballots | Governing

Citing security concerns, the Virginia Board of Elections announced last Friday that it will stop using electronic voting machines in the state. The board’s action is the latest sign that state and local election agencies are trying to address growing concerns that the nation's election infrastructure is vulnerable to hacking. During the 2016 presidential election, Russia targeted voting systems in 21 states, according to U.S. officials. Though U.S. security officials say the cyberbreach did not impact vote-counting, they have warned of future, and more intrusive, attacks. Some states -- including Virginia and Georgia, which recently announced a pilot program to use paper ballots -- hope eliminating the use of electronic ballots will reduce the threat of cyberattacks.

National: The Trump Voter-Fraud Commission’s Data Problem | The Atlantic

“Election Fraud is rampant!! California has 11 Counties that have MORE VOTERS than registered voters!!” reads one of the most recent public comments submitted to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. “I have personally witnessed voter fraud in California,” reads another comment. An earlier comment claims that “many [voters] were deceased and many were not citizens.”  Yet another post is from a former San Diego poll watcher who claims to have witnessed attempted voter fraud and was told by an elections official: “if someone wants to vote I am not about to stop them. This is America, not China!” Over 500 comments were submitted online during the run-up to the second meeting of the commission on Tuesday, which was led by its vice-chair Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Many of those comments were in the same vein as those from the San Diego poll watcher, containing anecdotes or hearsay about egregious incidents of voter fraud or alleging massive levels of fraud on a national level. While those public comments weren’t directly addressed during the proceedings of the meeting, they did help set its tone, as Kobach and his fellow commissioners grappled with the gap between rhetoric on voter fraud—backed by ample anecdote—and data on in-person voter fraud, which are scant.

National: Trump’s Voter-Fraud Commission Heads to New Hampshire | The New Yorker

Last week, much of official Washington rejoiced after President Trump made a deal with senior congressional Democrats to forestall a government shutdown, provide aid to hurricane victims, and raise the debt ceiling until December. The deal, some observers claimed, marked Trump’s long-awaited pivot to conventional Presidential leadership and a bipartisan style of governing. Some praised this maneuver as statesmanlike, while others denounced it as a betrayal of the President’s fellow-Republicans, but there was something close to consensus that Trump had jettisoned the hard-right politics expressed at the beginning of his term in office and begun a new and different chapter. This is, to put it charitably, nonsense. Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer, the top Democrats in Congress, understandably accepted a modest political gift from the President; Trump, by agreeing to just a three-month extension of the deadlines, gave the opposition party somewhat more leverage when the next negotiation takes place, before the end of the year. But, notwithstanding the developments of last week, which mostly amount to inside baseball, the course of the Trump Presidency is set, and conservatives are still very much in charge.

National: Trump’s Fraud Commission Embroiled In New Controversy Ahead Of Next Meeting | NPR

What was already expected to be a contentious second meeting for President Trump's Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, on Tuesday in Manchester, N.H., is likely to get a whole lot more contentious thanks to a column written by the panel's co-chair. Although the chairman, Vice President Pence, said in that first meeting that the commission has "no preconceived notions or pre-ordained results," the panel's co-chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, seemed to contradict him in Breitbart News last week. Kobach claimed that "now there's proof" of voter fraud in last year's election, enough to have likely changed the outcome of a key Senate race. He cited a report that more than 5,000 New Hampshire voters used out-of-state drivers' licences as identification and have yet to update those licenses, even though new residents are required to do so within 60 days of moving to the state. "It is highly likely that voting by nonresidents changed the result," wrote Kobach, one of the few election officials in the country who hasn't dismissed Trump's unfounded claim that up to 5 million ballots were cast illegally last year. What Kobach didn't say in the Breitbart column is that there are other possible explanations for all the out-of-state voter IDs. The most likely is that many were used by out-of-state college students, who are still eligible to vote.

National: Stronger election security with less technology | GCN

With the wide variety of voting systems technology and uneven security requirements in local jurisdictions across the country, the best defense against election hacking may involve less technology, experts said. "I don't have a lot of confidence" in the security of election equipment, said Alex Halderman, who is director of the University of Michigan's Center for Computer Security and Society and researches voting machine security. "The machines have vulnerabilities that could allow someone to hack in and alter the software that's running on them," he said at a Sept. 8 Brookings Institution discussion. "You don't even need physical access to the machines."

National: Data breaches like Equifax could make it cheap, easy to alter voter registrations | Philadelphia Inquirer

How convenient for voters: Pennsylvania and New Jersey allow them to change registration information online, including address and party affiliation. How convenient for wannabe attackers, too: With more personal information available online, it could be cheap and easy to falsely submit thousands of changes online to voter registrations, making some legitimate voters ineligible to cast ballots. A new study found that it would have cost as little as $1,934 last year to falsely submit online changes to 10 percent of registrations in Pennsylvania, a political battleground state that was pivotal to the 2016 presidential election. A similar attack on 10 percent of New Jersey voters’ registrations would have cost just $1,069, the researchers found. “It’s clear that impostors can definitely launch these attacks, and it’s not particularly expensive to launch these attacks against these websites,” said Latanya Sweeney, a government professor at Harvard University and one of the study’s authors.

National: Trump fraud commission will review proposal for background checks for voters | The Kansas City Star

President Donald Trump’s controversial voting commission will weigh a proposal Tuesday about requiring a background check before a person can register to vote — similar to buying a gun. John Lott, the president of the Pennsylvania-based Crime Prevention Research Center, will present the concept when the commission holds its second meeting of the year in New Hampshire. Lott’s PowerPoint, which was posted on the White House’s website in advance of the meeting, includes a slide titled “How to check if the right people are voting.” He notes that Republicans worry that ineligible people are voting, while Democrats contend “that Republicans are just imagining things.” Lott proposes applying the federal background check system for gun purchases, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, to voter registrations.

National: Trump’s voter commission meets amid concerns about mission | Associated Press

A commission created by President Donald Trump to investigate his allegations of voter fraud is coming to New Hampshire a week after its vice chairman angered state leaders by claiming out-of-state voters in November helped elect a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. The vice chairman, Republican Kris Kobach, who also is Kansas’ secretary of state, said last week that newly released data showed more than 6,500 people registered to vote last year using out-of-state driver’s licenses but only 15 percent had acquired New Hampshire licenses. That was proof, he said, that fraud likely led to then-Gov. Maggie Hassan’s victory over Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte in the Senate race. But state law allows someone — like a college student or military personnel on active duty — to be domiciled in New Hampshire for voting purposes and be a resident of another state for driver’s licensing purposes. Kobach’s comments prompted all four members of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation to demand the state’s representative on the commission, Secretary of State Bill Gardner, step down. Gardner, a Democrat, said he could not condone Kobach’s claims but would remain on the commission because he wants to understand why Americans are losing trust in the election process.