National

Americans heading to the polls today (Nov. 8) might vote using punch-card ballots, optically scanned paper ballots (which are generally handwritten) or computerized systems that record votes. In a few districts (mostly small and rural), voters might fill out an old-fashioned paper ballot and put it in a box. Those who voted before 2010 might remember the old lever machines. In the U.S., the hodgepodge of voting methods has a long and odd history, one determined by the sometimes conflicting needs of counting votes accurately, preventing election fraud and checking the accuracy of total counts. Because voting procedures are left up to individual states, it gets even more complicated, according to Warren Stewart, communications director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting technologies.

National: Voters Facing Long Lines, Voting Machine Problems in States | Associated Press

Despite Donald Trump’s continued skepticism that the election was on the up-and-up, few voters who went to the polls Tuesday encountered problems — and even then, most of the trouble involved the usual machine breakdowns and long lines. The run-up to the vote was fraught, with unsupported claims by the Republican presidential candidate of a rigged election and fears that hackers might attack voting systems. He reiterated his claims on Election Day, after his campaign announced it was seeking an investigation in the battleground state of Nevada over reports that some early voting locations had allowed people to join lines to vote after polls were scheduled to close. Asked on Fox News if he would accept Tuesday’s results, Trump continued to demur. “We’re going to see how things play out today and hopefully they will play out well and hopefully we won’t have to worry about it,” he said. Later in the interview, he said, “It’s largely a rigged system.”

National: Trump seizes on isolated glitches to fuel ‘rigged’ election claims | Politico

Long lines, computer glitches and other isolated problems marked Election Day 2016, a far cry from the widespread chaos, cyber-assault, vote-rigging and voter intimidation that had been predicted by both sides for months. At least four counties in the battleground state of Pennsylvania reported malfunctions with their controversial electronic voting machines, giving Donald Trump evidence to level his charge that the presidential election isn’t happening on the up and up. But the problems in Pennsylvania, according to Democrats, some Republicans and many computer scientists who know these aging voting machines best, are not out of the ordinary. What’s more, they insisted no votes have ultimately been miscounted. “Things are moving well, “said Will Estrada, chairman of Virginia’s Loduoun County, which includes the Washington D.C. suburbs. “We’re almost afraid to jinx ourselves candidly because it’s gone smoothly,” added Alex Triantafillou, chairman of Ohio’s Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati. Indeed, even Republican chairmen in three crucial battleground counties told POLITICO that everything was running smoothly through early afternoon – with no significant concerns about fraud, irregularities or vote-rigging.

National: Americans can vote from space, so why not from U.S. island territories? | CBC

An American orbiting in outer space can vote, but four million citizens and nationals living on U.S. soil have been left behind. While NASA astronaut Kate Rubins cast her ballot last month from the International Space Station, around 350 kilometres above planet Earth, those living in the five American island territories in Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa and Puerto Rico will not be able to vote to elect their next president. Territorial residents have some of the highest military enlistment rates, yet many have no say when it comes to deciding their next commander-in-chief.

National: Here Are All the Ways That Technology Could Screw Up Today’s Election | MIT Technology Review

As millions of people head to polling stations to cast their votes, there can be no denying that today will have its fair share of drama—and much of it could be influenced by technology. For one thing, hackers could send polling stations into chaos. They probably won’t mess with your ballot, though—if they do try to skew results, it would be by tampering with voter registration information. So if you turn up to the booths and are unable to cast your vote, there’s a chance that hackers are to blame. Then there’s the issue of Internet voting. In total, 31 states use the Internet to collect votes in some way—and in Alaska, anyone’s allowed to vote through a website. That’s despite the fact that it’s demonstrably a risky practice, open to hacking and manipulation.

National: US election: Experts keep watch over ‘hack states’ | BBC

The concern that the 2016 US presidential election may be hacked, by Russia or some other bad actor, could hold the same place in history as the Millennium Bug: a whole load of worry over nothing. “Unless the election is extraordinarily close, it is unlikely that an attack will result in the wrong candidate getting elected,” suggest Matt Bernhard and Professor J Alex Halderman, security experts from the University of Michigan. But they say the risk the election process could be disrupted by hackers should be taken extremely seriously. In the run up to the big day, the US Department of Homeland Security has been carrying out “cyber hygiene” tests on voting systems across the country. Officials are confident in the technology, but there are weaknesses that have security professionals standing-by on election day ready to step-in if irregularities are spotted.

National: Fear Is Driving Voting Rights Advocates and Vigilantes to Watch Polling Stations | The New York Times

Millions of Americans will cast their ballots on Tuesday under intense scrutiny both from vigilantes who fear the election will be rigged and from thousands of voting rights advocates who fear the tally will be distorted by intimidation and, perhaps, the suppression of a minority vote that may be crucial to the outcome. On one side are groups like the Oath Keepers, one of dozens of right-wing and militia groups responding to Donald J. Trump’s warnings about a stolen election. The organization has issued a nationwide “call to action” to its members, urging them to go “incognito” to polling stations on Election Day to “hunt down” instances of fraud. On the other side are more than 100 civic and legal groups, claiming at least 10,000 volunteers, and perhaps many more. They plan to deploy at polling places nationwide to watch for signs of voter intimidation and other roadblocks to voting. Election officials and observers say they are hoping for an orderly final day of voting, but they are girding for the possibility of fights, intimidation and, perhaps, worse. Adding to the anxiety is fear of Election Day hacking, perhaps by foreign interests. “I would say this is the most frightening election period I can remember in my adult life,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California, Irvine.

National: Here’s how hackers can wreak havoc on Election Day | Recode

Whatever the outcome Tuesday, there’s one thing that could very well happen: Accusations that the election has been rigged and the results falsified. This is extremely unlikely — voter fraud is more rare than being struck by lightning, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. But the 2016 presidential race has been riddled with leaks perpetrated by hackers who wormed their way into servers to try to undermine the election. And though there’s little precedent, the truth is that interference by hackers tomorrow is totally possible. That doesn’t mean hackers are necessarily able to alter the election results, but they could sow fear and mayhem that lead to claims of rigging after Election Day. Here’s how. “Most voting systems are not designed to be connected to the internet for their operation, and because of that there’s no easy remote way in,” said Pamela Smith of VerifiedVoting.org, a nonpartisan group that promotes accuracy and transparency at the polls. Officials like to point out that this is a security feature. But, Smith says, that doesn’t rule out concern for an insider threat.

National: Security vendor demonstrates hack of U.S. e-voting machine | Computerworld

A hacker armed with a $25 PCMCIA card can, within a few minutes, change the vote totals on an aging electronic voting machine that is now in limited use in 13 U.S. states, a cybersecurity vendor has demonstrated. The hack by security vendor Cylance — which released a video of it Friday — caught the attention of noted National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, but other critics of e-voting security dismissed the vulnerability as nothing new. The Cylance hack demonstrated a theoretical vulnerability described in research going back a decade, the company noted. The hack is “not surprising,” Pamela Smith, president of elections security advocacy group Verified Voting, said by email. “The timing of the release is a little odd.” … The Cylance demonstration was “not new and badly timed,” said Joe Kiniry, a security researcher and CEO at Free and Fair, an election technology developer. “This kind of attack has been demonstrated on almost all of the widely deployed machines used today.”

National: Vulnerable Voting Machines Yet Another IoT Device to Secure | eSecurity Planet

This election season, voting machine security is probably not top of mind. After all, 75 percent of votes cast in the United States use paper ballots, and many electronic machines print a ballot to maintain a paper trail. However, according to Pamela Smith, president of election integrity organization Verified Voting, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina use electronic voting machines. If connected to a network, a voting machine could be yet another device that needs to be secured. For instance, hackers could likely intercept signals from an electronic voting machine connected to the network, similar to how hackers could intercept a user’s data when he or she connects to public Wi-Fi. Earlier this year, the FBI issued an alert requesting that states contact their Board of Elections and determine if any suspicious activity had been detected in their logs, following the hacking of two state election boards, one of which resulted in data being stolen. This led to ongoing speculation as to whether tomorrow’s election will be hacked.

National: US Election Systems Seen ‘Painfully Vulnerable’ to Cyberattack | VoA News

In the waning days of his campaign to win the White House, Donald Trump has been warning his supporters that the presidential vote is being “rigged” against the Republicans and in favor of rival Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. … Trump campaign officials have been quick to clarify that when Trump talks about “rigging,” he’s usually referring to what he sees as media bias against his candidacy. But all the talk of election irregularities has elevated concerns among some Americans about the security of their votes — and perhaps in one regard, with good reason. … Elections in the U.S. are run individually by the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Secretaries of state, both Republicans and Democrats, insist their systems are secure. That message was recently echoed by Thomas Hicks, chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who told members of the U.S. House of Representatives, “There’s no national system that a hacker or a bad actor can infiltrate to affect the American elections as a whole.” Hicks’ views are not shared among many cyber researchers. “I’m pretty worried,” said J. Alex Halderman, director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan. “We’re facing some pretty serious threats when it comes to security and elections. I’m quite worried that in an election soon we’ll see real attacks that will either try to disrupt the election or possibly would try to change votes.”

National: Your Government Isn’t That Worried About An Election Day Cyberattack | WIRED

Over the past few months, an escalating series of attacks on computer networks—many of them inflicted by something called the Mirai botnet, which uses a web of infected DVRs, webcams, and other “smart” devices to drown targeted websites in traffic—have wrought unprecedented havoc all over the world. Experts have speculated that these distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks are a “rehearsal” for something bigger. Meanwhile Russian hackers have been busy throwing monkey wrenches into the American presidential election, breaking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee this summer and (it seems) leaking emails from John Podesta, a high-level aide to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The confluence of these two threats—a super-powerful botnet and the specter of Russian influence on the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—has stoked fears of a massive cyberattack that could upend the vote on November 8. So, yes, the government and the cybersecurity industry are on high alert. “A lot of actors will try to take advantage of a high-profile event to cause trouble or raise their profiles,” says Ian Gray, a cyber intelligence analyst for Flashpoint, which has been at the center of monitoring and mitigating attacks by Mirai. But intelligence does not point to a connection between the autumn spree of DDOS attacks and a state-sponsored effort to hack the election itself. And government officials say they don’t believe an attack is likely to black out some massive chunk of the internet in order to wreak political havoc on Tuesday.

National: When Voting Machines Misbehave | Bloomberg

Interference by hackers is just one of the nightmare scenarios that worry computer scientists about the upcoming election. The other is a race so close that calling the result is beyond the capacity of today’s voting technology. Experts who’ve delved into the accuracy of these apparatuses — from punch cards and mechanical levers to electronic voting machines — say that no system is perfect. In most cases the error rates are unknown, or are only measured in artificial test settings and not as they would be used in the real world. Computer scientist Douglas Jones of the University of Iowa, who co-authored the book “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?,” came to realize that voters usually blame themselves when something goes wrong in the voting booth — a tendency that could mask intentional hacking or equipment error. When Jones set up experiments with electronic voting machines rigged to switch votes away from the subjects’ choices, the people casting ballots assumed they had done something wrong. “People tend to trust the machines,” he said — even when the machines don’t work. Electronic voting machines use proprietary software, making it hard for outside researchers to get a measure of their error rates, according to computer scientist Rebecca Mercuri, founder of the company Notable Software and an expert on electronic voting systems. “In polling they say the results are plus or minus 3 points or so, but they don’t say that about voting machines,” she said. “If it’s a really close election, you’re looking at a crapshoot.”

National: Cyberattacks on Election Day Might Not Happen, But If They Do They’ll be Denials of Service and Disinformation | WIRED

Hacks, sata leaks, and disinformation have all added to the chaos of one of the most contentious elections in history. US intelligence agencies have even accused Russia of perpetrating some portion of the digital meddling. And now reports indicate that officials are preparing for worst-case cybersecurity scenarios on November 8. But what might those election day digital threats realistically look like? Government officials and the media have been worried over the possibilities of attacks that might hack voting machines, leak last-minute November surprises about candidates, or even sabotage the power grid. But ask the cybersecurity community, and they’ll tell you the easiest way to hack the election is a simpler, two-pronged attack: Black out sources of real information and spread disinformation. “They’re going to try to influence this election further using a combination of things like additional leaks, DDoS attacks, and targeting the media,” says Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at the security firm CrowdStrike. “What better way to destabilize a country without a shot being fired than by leveraging these various tools to play with people?”

National: Spread of Early Voting Is Forging New Habits and Campaign Tactics | The New York Times

In 1977, a flood control measure on the ballot in Monterey, Calif., became what historians say was the first modern American election decided by people who voted before Election Day. It was a strange moment even for some who participated; elections had traditionally been a kind of civic gathering, on one day. But the practice caught on with voters, and it eventually spread from the West Coast to 37 states and the District of Columbia. Today, at least 43 million Americans have already voted in the presidential election. And when the ballots are tallied nationwide Tuesday evening, more than one-third of them will have come from people who voted early — a record. Voting before Election Day has become so commonplace that it is reshaping how campaigns are waged, and how Americans see the race in its final, frantic days. “The idea that one wakes up and it’s Election Day in America is actually a rather quaint idea now,” said Russ Schriefer, a Republican consultant who has worked on presidential campaigns for two decades. “It is as much as a monthlong process to draw people in. And so your advertising tactics, your messaging tactics and certainly your ground game have changed completely.”

National: Under the Din of the Presidential Race Lies a Once and Future Threat: Cyberwarfare | The New York Times

The 2016 presidential race will be remembered for many ugly moments, but the most lasting historical marker may be one that neither voters nor American intelligence agencies saw coming: It is the first time that a foreign power has unleashed cyberweapons to disrupt, or perhaps influence, a United States election. And there is a foreboding sense that, in elections to come, there is no turning back. The steady drumbeat of allegations of Russian troublemaking — leaks from stolen emails and probes of election-system defenses — has continued through the campaign’s last days. These intrusions, current and former administration officials agree, will embolden other American adversaries, which have been given a vivid demonstration that, when used with some subtlety, their growing digital arsenals can be particularly damaging in the frenzy of a democratic election.

National: Cyber ‘SWAT’ teams gird for Election Day trouble | USA Today

Law enforcement officials, government workers and cyber-security professionals are preparing to swoop in, track and hopefully block anyone attempting a cyberattack aimed at destabilizing the U.S. presidential election. The possibility is slight, with risks lessened by the fractured, pre-digital nature of the national voting apparatus. Still, fears that hackers — perhaps from Russia — could instill doubts about the voting process via attacks on the Internet infrastructure have put the cyber-security community on guard. In a way, they are girding for war, but the fronts are multiple and decentralized. Although many are keeping low profiles, we know about some.

National: The Art Of The Vote: Who Designs The Ballots We Cast? | NPR

When a voter heads to the polls, any number of factors may influence how she casts her vote: party affiliation, her impression of the candidates — or even the design of the ballot itself. The visual layout of a ballot can have a surprising effect on a voter’s decision. And anyone who recalls the 2000 presidential election, which drew national attention to some confusing elements of the Florida ballot, can tell you that designers don’t always get it right. So, who are the people designing the ballots? That depends on where you’re asking. “There is no federal ballot design authority,” Dana Chisnell tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. Chisnell is co-director of the Center for Civic Design, a nonprofit aimed at developing best practices for election materials. “How ballots get designed is really a combination of local election officials and what their printers can do, if it’s a print-based ballot, and what the computers can do, if it’s an electronic voting system.”

National: Would it matter if either Trump or Clinton refused to concede? Yes and no. | CS Monitor

After an ambiguous answer from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump last month, Fox News TV host Chris Wallace followed up Sunday during an interview with Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, to ask whether the GOP candidates would accept the outcome of Tuesday’s election. It’s a question that has clung to the Republican ticket like heavy fog for two-and-a-half weeks since Trump said during the third and final presidential debate that he would hold the American public “in suspense” rather than vowing before Election Day to accept the results, whether he wins or loses. That noncommittal response drew harsh criticism from those who said he threatened the very fabric of American democracy. But the reality is that, even if either Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton were to fail to concede on election night or at any point thereafter, the electoral process would carry on anyway and place a new president in the White House. The winner is still the winner, whether the loser acknowledges the results or not. “Concession is constitutionally irrelevant,” Jeff Becker, an associate professor of political science at the University of the Pacific, tells The Christian Science Monitor. Even though the political mechanisms will proceed without regard for whether a defeated candidate publicly acknowledges his or her loss, an artful concession remains vitally important to American political futures, Dr. Becker adds.

National: Could Russia Hack Presidential Election 2016? | iTech Post

Cybersecurity researchers are raising the specter of a Russian cyber attack on Election Day and many voters are concerned that the presidential election could be hacked after Russia’s recent hack of the Democratic National Committee. American voters are concerned that the presidential election could become the target of hackers and the outcome could be manipulated. In this troubled context, GOP candidate Donald Trump has also added to the general anxiety by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential election to be cast on Tuesday, Nov. 8. Trump suggested that in case if he loses, he might not accept the results. But is it really possible to hack the election? How really vulnerable is the U.S. presidential election to an eventual Russian hacking? … Pamela Smith, president of the non-partisan lobbying group Verified Voting, explained for the same publication that the U.S. doesn’t have a national voting system but rather local jurisdiction-specific voting systems. On the international scene, there were indeed some elections that have been tampered with over the internet, but that could happen only where there’s been a national election system. That’s not the case of the U.S.

National: Push for Automatic Voter Registration Ramps Up Again | The Atlantic

One of the many supposed truisms about politics is that you’re never supposed to look past the next election. Yet as this historic presidential race draws to a close, voting rights advocates are already ramping up efforts to expand the rolls in future elections through automatic voter registration. In the District of Columbia, the city council this week unanimously approved legislation allowing eligible citizens to register when they sign up for a driver’s license. In Nevada, organizers for a group led by Obama campaign veterans are gathering signatures to put a similar law on the ballot in 2018; they must submit the petition by Election Day this year. Voters in Alaska will decide a ballot measure next week that would automatically register nonvoters when they sign up to receive dividend payments from the state’s oil revenue fund. And in Illinois, Democrats in the state legislature are hoping to hold a vote in the weeks after November 8 to override Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto of legislation enshrining automatic voter registration.

National: Civil rights advocates work to prevent polling chaos | The Washington Post

It’s 10 a.m. but the room is already warm with body heat and the smell of coffee. Behind the locked glass doors of a downtown Washington office, in a conference room outfitted with 20 phone lines, computer workstations and posters that try to make inspirational art out of single words such as “Dedication,” volunteers are fielding phone call after phone call. This is one of the front lines in one of the most contentious presidential elections in memory. It is one outpost of the Election Protection Coalition voter hotline, a volunteer-staffed nonpartisan network of organizations devoted to protecting the right to vote. The advocates behind the operation say they are worried that more than any presidential election in the past 50 years, the 2016 contest carries a pronounced risk for impropriety and mischief. They, too, like Donald Trump, worry that the election could be rigged. But not in the way the Republican nominee has insisted it will be — by “inner city” residents resorting to fraud to help elect Hillary Clinton. They are more concerned about a combination of ordinary and extraordinary voter confusion; a lack of pre-election federal oversight and the specter of in-person voter intimidation by Trump supporters.

National: The Election Will Still Go on, Even if Hackers Attack | TIME

With cybersecurity researchers raising the specter of a cyber attack on Election Day, state and local officials are doubling down on a different message: no matter what, the final vote will be legitimate. “If there’s one message we want be heard loud and clear, it’s that these elections will be fair,” Denise Merrill, the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the Secretary of State of Connecticut, told TIME. “It might take longer to count every vote, there might be more hurdles, but it’ll be fair.” In the event that hackers attack voting systems, state and local officials have paper-based back-up plans in place, she said. In the event that hackers shut down larger targets, like parts of the power grid, government buildings, electrical facilities, water systems, street lights, dams or bridges, all of which are now connected to the internet, state and local election officials can implement other contingency plans, election officials told TIME.

National: Threats Of Intimidation Of Minority Voters Leads Civil Rights Organization To Launch Reporting App | Forbes

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rabble-rousing allegations of “large scale voter fraud” has incited his followers, including white nationalist and alt-right groups, to proclaim they would monitor polling places to prevent “rigged elections.” The fearmongering has raised concerns of voter suppression and intimidation, particularly in African-American and Latino communities that tend to lean more democratic. And in a numbers game, that is what the opposition is worried about. There is a record 27.3 million Hispanic eligible voters for the 2016 election, 44% of which are millennials with an average age of 19, according to Pew Research and Census data. While the voter growth among this ethnic group is mostly of U.S.-born Latino youth, there has also been a 26% increase in eligible voters who have become naturalized citizens since 2012.

National: There Are 868 Fewer Places to Vote in 2016 Because the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act | The Nation

When Aracely Calderon, a naturalized US citizen from Guatemala, went to vote in downtown Phoenix just before the polls closed in Arizona’s March 22 presidential primary, there were more than 700 people in a line stretching four city blocks. She waited in line for five hours, becoming the last voter in the state to cast a ballot at 12:12 am. “I’m here to exercise my right to vote,” she said shortly before midnight, explaining why she stayed in line. Others left without voting because they didn’t have four or five hours to spare. The lines were so long because Republican election officials in Phoenix’s Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, from 200 to just 60—one polling place per 21,000 registered voters. Previously, Maricopa County would have needed federal approval to reduce the number of polling sites, because Arizona was one of 16 states where jurisdictions with a long history of discrimination had to submit their voting changes under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This part of the VRA blocked 3,000 discriminatory voting changes from 1965 to 2013. That changed when the Supreme Court gutted the law in the June 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision.

National: U.S. Government: Hackers Ready to Hit Back If Russia Tries to Disrupt Election | NBC

U.S. military hackers have penetrated Russia’s electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin’s command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary, according to a senior intelligence official and top-secret documents reviewed by NBC News. American officials have long said publicly that Russia, China and other nations have probed and left hidden malware on parts of U.S critical infrastructure, “preparing the battlefield,” in military parlance, for cyber attacks that could turn out the lights or turn off the internet across major cities. It’s been widely assumed that the U.S. has done the same thing to its adversaries. The documents reviewed by NBC News — along with remarks by a senior U.S. intelligence official — confirm that, in the case of Russia.

National: Media launches joint war-room to spot voting problems | Politico

After spending 2016 trying to outmaneuver each other and deliver the next big break, hundreds of newsrooms are now engaged in unprecedented reporting partnerships to uncover barriers to voting and debunk fake news that can cause chaos and confusion on Election Day. The biggest of the new alliances is Electionland, a project involving more than 400 newsrooms across the country casting aside competitiveness to share real-time data and tips on everything from reports about long lines and voter intimidation to hoax tweets suggesting stuffed ballot boxes. New York-based journalism non-profit ProPublica created the free service earlier this year by partnering up with national desks at USA Today and The New York Times, as well as scores of local news organizations including the Arizona Republic, Miami Herald and the Virginian-Pilot. Participating reporters and editors are all connected to an online smorgasbord of story leads and sources culled from social media, text messages and a national telephone helpline that the public is using to report voting problems. “It’s an entire national newsroom, essentially only looking at problems facing people who vote,” said Jessica Huseman, a ProPublica senior reporting fellow.

National: World’s fate hangs on dubious election technology | UKAuthority