National

I see you have questions about how elections work in the United States. Up until now, you probably haven’t thought much about how elections work and why someone’s experience in Massachusetts could be so different from yours in Alabama, or Florida, or Georgia, or Arkansas, or Montana, or Michigan, or Nevada, or California. You want to know why we’re not all doing the same things the same way. You want to know why there is no federal standard for ballot design or a national voting system. You want to fix things. Welcome. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s lift the curtain a bit on how U.S. elections get done. That should help you be involved in the right way at the right time to make elections better. From the 40,000-foot level, elections look roughly the same from state to state. This might lead you to think that because we end up with one result that the way elections are administered is pretty much the same across the country. But it’s not. If you move from Washington State to New York State, your experience and the process for registering, getting access to a ballot, and actually marking the ballot will be different, from one to the other.

National: Senators call for declassification of files on Russia’s role in US election | The Guardian

Seven Democratic and Democratic-aligned members of the Senate intelligence committee have hinted that significant information about Russian interference in the US presidential election remains secret and ought to be declassified. The seven senators, including the incoming ranking member Mark Warner of Virginia, wrote to Barack Obama to request he declassify relevant intelligence on the election. They did not directly accuse the Russian government or President-elect Donald Trump, a Republican, of wrongdoing in the letter. “We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian government and the US election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels,” wrote Warner and his colleagues Ron Wyden of Oregon, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and independent Angus King of Maine.

National: What Stein is getting from recount | The Hill

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein’s call for a recount has won her headlines and money, both of which could prove beneficial to the politician and her party going forward. Stein’s call for a recount in Wisconsin might have come as a surprise to some observers. She won just 1 percent of the vote in the state and finished a distant fourth. Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won the national popular vote, finished a close second to Republican Donald Trump in the Badger State. But it wasn’t her party asking for the recount. It was Stein, who has repeatedly shown a willingness to step into the public limelight to battle with both major parties. Stein hit the Clinton machine for piggy-backing on her recount efforts and for failing to take the threat of election hacking seriously. Seen as largely an afterthought during the presidential race, Stein is receiving heavy news coverage from the media for her efforts. And by tapping into Democratic angst over Trump’s surprise victory over Clinton, she’s building a fundraising apparatus greater than she had before.

National: Recount Bids in 3 States Seem the Longest of Long Shots | The New York Times

It has been nearly a month since Donald J. Trump beat Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. But efforts continue in three battleground states to take another look at the election results. On Thursday, Wisconsin is set to begin the labor-intensive task of reviewing nearly three million ballots in a recount across all of the state’s 72 counties. Michigan is likely to follow suit starting on Friday. And in Pennsylvania, there are persisting legal challenges to the presidential results as well. It is extremely unlikely that this attempt — spearheaded by Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate — will prompt any of these states to flip to Mrs. Clinton, as Mr. Trump leads by a combined margin of around 100,000 votes. Mrs. Clinton would need to be declared the winner in all three states to reverse the Electoral College outcome.

National: So, what does it mean for there to be an election recount? | Public Radio International

November 30, 2016

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein is paying for a recount in Wisconsin, with recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania likely to join. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has agreed to participate in the recount effort. Recounts typically do not reverse election results, but that notion hasn’t stopped President-elect Donald Trump from tweeting, without evidence, that there was “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.” “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” the president-elect wrote in another unsubstantiated tweet. Trump won the election by less than 100,000 votes across four swing states.

National: Voting rights advocates brace for ‘biggest fight of our lifetime’ during Trump administration | The Washington Post

November 30, 2016

Voting rights advocates are furious at President-elect Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and concerned that his administration will more vigorously adopt measures that will make it harder for some groups of people to vote. Some state and local election officials in recent years have cited the potential for voter fraud as the reason for enacting strict voter ID laws, requiring additional verification for people who want to register to vote and conducting mass voter purges. Trump’s promotion of the widely debunked notion of rampant voter fraud and the presence in his inner circle of political leaders who supported stricter voting laws send a troubling signal, say advocates who have spent the past several years fighting what they say are efforts to disenfranchise minorities, young, elderly and low-income voters. “They don’t want us to participate in this democracy,” said Cristóbal J. Alex, president of the Latino Victory Project. “We are gearing up for what will be the biggest fight of our lifetime.”

National: Anti-Trump forces launch attack on Electoral College | Politico

November 30, 2016

Anti-Trump forces are preparing an unprecedented assault on the Electoral College, marked by a wave of lawsuits and an intensive lobbying effort aimed at persuading 37 Republican electors to vote for a candidate other than Donald Trump. It’s a bracing stress-test for an institution that Alexander Hamilton envisioned as a safeguard against popular whims, and a direct challenge to the role that the Electoral College has evolved to play in picking the president: constitutional rubber stamp. Behind the overt anti-Trump push is a covert agenda: If the courts establish that individual electors can switch allegiances, supporting candidates other than those who win their states, it would inject so much uncertainty into the process that states may be willing to junk the Electoral College in favor of a popular-vote winner. “There might well be a clamor to get rid of the Electoral College altogether, a move that would have some disadvantages (like eliminating Hamilton’s safeguard) but many advantages as well,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “Anyhow, clamor and anger have become par for the course in this loony election year.”

National: Security experts join Jill Stein’s ‘election changing’ recount campaign | The Guardian

More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump, as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all its 3m ballots. Half a dozen academics and other specialists on Monday submitted new testimony supporting a lawsuit from Stein against Wisconsin authorities, in which she asked a court to prevent county officials from carrying out their recounts by machine. … Professor Poorvi Vora of George Washington University said in an affidavit that hackers could have infected vote-scanning machinery in Wisconsin with malware designed to skew automatic recounts as well as the original vote count. “It is not possible to determine with certainty the absence of malicious software hiding within what might appear to be many thousands of lines of legitimate software code,” said Vora, who added that the only way to ensure the integrity of the count was a recount by hand. … Arguing that a manual count of paper ballots was the only way to ensure there had been no outside interference, Professor Ronald Rivest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology quoted the Russian proverb made famous by president Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.” “We have learned the hard way that almost any computer system can be broken into by a sufficiently determined, skillful, and persistent adversary,” said Rivest.

National: Electronic voting under scrutiny as computer experts lobby for recounts in swing states | Washington Times

The paper-or-plastic dilemma has moved out of the supermarket and into America’s boards of elections, where officials are grappling with that very question in the wake of yet another messy presidential race. Paper ballots seemed headed for extinction after Americans spent Thanksgiving 2000 glued to their televisions, watching Broward County canvassing board Judge Robert Rosenberg peer through his giant magnifying glass at dimpled, pregnant and hanging chads during the Florida recount. But election officials who flocked toward electronic machines in the wake of the recount are now having a rethink, as fears of hacking set in. Those fears were further stoked this week when a group of voting and computer experts urged recounts in three swing states, saying tampering could have swung the Nov. 8 election to Donald Trump. “The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania,” J. Alex Halderman, the computer expert who has lobbied the Clinton campaign to demand recounts, said in an internet post Wednesday.

National: Russia probably didn’t hack US election – but we still need audits, experts say | The Guardian

The computer science experts who want the presidential election results audited don’t think a Russian vote-hacking operation is likely, either. But they’ve been upset for a decade that there’s no way to make sure. Jeremy J Epstein, senior computer scientist at research center SRI International, said the effort to audit the vote “was and is a nationwide effort over a long period of time”. The Green party candidate, Jill Stein, has applied for a recount. The Clinton campaign has said it will cooperate. “The Stein folks have somewhat hijacked the message, but I’m not worried,” Epstein said. “In fact, the goal of an audit is to verify [emphasis his] that the result was as originally reported.” Epstein describes himself as “75% confident that Trump won, and 25% that either there was an error in counting or there was a hack”. “Any accusation that it’s partisan and of-the-moment is ignorant of the history,” Epstein told the Guardian. Epstein, formerly of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, is one of the country’s foremost experts on election security and last year successfully crusaded to get insecure WinVote voting machines decertified and removed in Virginia.

National: Vote Recount Push Advances, but Reversing Trump’s Win Is Unlikely | The New York Times

President-elect Donald J. Trump is well into filling out his cabinet and picking key advisers. But a move to challenge the vote tallies in three swing states — an extreme long shot to reverse his Electoral College majority — is advancing in the background, creating a noisy distraction on Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed and raising last-ditch hopes of some Hillary Clinton supporters. In Wisconsin, elections officials said on Monday that a recount of the state’s nearly three million votes would most likely begin on Thursday. In Pennsylvania, Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, who initiated the recounts, filed a legal challenge of the results in state court. And the Stein campaign said it planned to request a recount in Michigan on Wednesday. Neither Ms. Stein nor the Clinton campaign has found evidence of election tampering in any of the three states, where Mr. Trump beat Mrs. Clinton by a combined margin of only about 100,000 votes. But once Ms. Stein seized on the issue last week, the Clinton campaign said it, too, would join in the efforts to seek recounts.

National: States reject Trump’s claim that illegal ballots gave Clinton popular vote | Fox News

President-Elect Donald Trump’s claim that ballot fraud in certain parts of the country cost him the popular vote is not going over well in the states he singled out. Hillary Clinton’s total was swollen by millions of people voting illegally in the Nov. 8 election, Trump said Sunday, citing New Hampshire, Virginia and California. Although Trump won easily with electoral votes, unofficial totals have him trailing Clinton 64,654,483 votes to 62,418,820, according to a Cook Political Report analysis Monday. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted Sunday. Officials in those states insisted Monday that Trump’s claim of millions of illegal votes, including ones allegedly cast by illegal immigrants, is unfounded.

National: Trump’s baseless assertions of voter fraud called ‘stunning’ | Politico

Donald Trump on Sunday used the platform of the presidency to peddle a fringe conspiracy theory to justify his loss of the popular vote, claiming without evidence that millions of people voted illegally Nov. 8. Trump’s tweets marked an unprecedented rebuke of the U.S. electoral system by a president-elect and were met with immediate condemnation from voting experts and others. And they offered a troubling indication that Trump’s ascension to the highest political office in the United States may not alter his penchant for repeating unproven conspiracies perpetuated by the far-right. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump wrote on Twitter. There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim and PolitiFact ruled it false. Several hours later, he added more specifics, but again without any evidence: “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!” Election law experts quickly rejected Trump’s claims as farfetched. “There’s no reason to believe this is true,” said Rick Hasen, a professor specializing in election law at the University of California, Irvine. “The level of fraud in US elections is quite low.” Hasen added, “The problem of non-citizen voting is quite small — like we’re talking claims in the dozens, we’re not talking voting in the millions, or the thousands, or even the hundreds.”

National: Clinton camp splits from White House on Jill Stein recount push | The Guardian

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said on Saturday it would help with efforts to secure recounts in several states, even as the White House defended the declared results as “the will of the American people”. The campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias, said in an online post that while it had found no evidence of sabotage, the campaign felt “an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton”. “We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton,” Elias wrote, “and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted.” In response, President-elect Donald Trump said in a statement: “The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.’”

National: U.S. Officials Defend Integrity of Vote, Despite Hacking Fears | The New York Times

The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people.” The statement came as liberal opponents of Donald J. Trump, some citing fears of vote hacking, are seeking recounts in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where his margin of victory was extremely thin. A drive by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, for recounts in those states had brought in more than $5 million by midday on Friday, her campaign said, and had increased its goal to $7 million. She filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday, about an hour before the deadline. In its statement, the administration said, “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect.”

National: Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say | The Washington Post

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation. Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

National: Trump’s term limits promise faces its own limits on Capitol Hill | The Washington Post

Of all the promises made on the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to pass a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress might be the most daunting. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dismissed the idea out of hand the day after Trump’s stunning victory. A few days later, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) gave the proposal a tepid endorsement as he indicated it would be up to a House committee to consider Trump’s proposal. The reticence of both Republican leaders on the issue is not surprising, given their long tenures in Congress.

National: Jill Stein raises $6 million for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania | CS Monitor

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has raised almost $6 million to petition the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to recount votes in order to determine if hacking skewed the election away from the expected victor, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In all three states, President-elect Donald Trump won an upset victory with a tiny margin. If the trio had gone blue, as was expected, Mrs. Clinton would have earned enough electoral votes to secure the election. Proponents of the recount have compared it to instant replay in a sporting event, but critics say it undermines confidence in the electoral process. While Clinton supporters are holding on to their last hope to see her in the White House, the Obama administration has announced that the election was not hacked, by Russians or anyone else. “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect,” the Obama administration wrote in a statement. “Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added.

National: Hillary Clinton’s Team to Join Wisconsin Recount Pushed by Jill Stein | The New York Times

Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday that it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin incited by a third-party candidate and would join any potential recounts in two other closely contested states, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states, and said it had seen no “actionable evidence” of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald J. Trump’s victory. But it suggested it was going along with the recount effort to assure supporters that it was doing everything possible to verify that hacking by Russia or other irregularities had not affected the results. In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, said the campaign would take part in the Wisconsin recount being set off by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and would also participate if Ms. Stein made good on her plans to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton lost those three states by a total of little more than 100,000 votes, sealing her Electoral College defeat by Mr. Trump.

National: Jill Stein raises over $4.5m to request US election recounts in battleground states | The Guardian

Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is preparing to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states. Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a multimillion-dollar fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The drive has already raised more than $4.5m, which the campaign said would enable it to file for recounts in Wisconsin on Friday and Pennsylvania on Monday. The fundraising page said it expected to need around $6m-7m to challenge the results in all three states. Stein said she was acting due to “compelling evidence of voting anomalies” and that data analysis had indicated “significant discrepancies in vote totals” that were released by state authorities. “These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified,” she said in a statement. “We deserve elections we can trust.” Stein’s move came amid growing calls for recounts or audits of the election results by groups of academics and activists concerned that foreign hackers may have interfered with election systems. The concerned groups have been urging Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic nominee, to join their cause.

National: Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones) | WIRED

After an election marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states. Dig into their argument, however, and it’s less alarmist than it might appear. If anything, it’s practical. There’s no evidence that the outcome of the presidential election was shifted by compromised voting machines. But a statistical audit of electronic voting results in key states as a routine safeguard—not just an emergency measure—would be a surprisingly simple way to ease serious, lingering doubts about America’s much-maligned electoral security. “Auditing ought to be a standard part of the election process,” says Ron Rivest, a cryptographer and computer science professor at MIT. “It ought to be a routine thing as much as a doctor washing his hands.” … While there’s no indication that polling places in the three states Halderman calls out were hacked, it’s well established that electronic voting machines are vulnerable to malware that could corrupt votes. Many US voting machines today scan a paper ballot that the voter fills out by hand, and many electronic systems produce a paper record as well. In fact, Halderman notes, about 70 percent of Americans live in voting districts that leave a paper trail. record exists that can be used to check its digital results. But all too often, no one ever does, he writes. “No state is planning to actually check the paper in a way that would reliably detect that the computer-based outcome was wrong,” Halderman says.

National: Clinton Being Pushed to Seek Vote Recount in 3 States | Associated Press

A group of election lawyers and data experts has asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign to call for a recount of the vote totals in three battleground states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — to ensure that a cyberattack was not committed to manipulate the totals. There is no evidence that the results were hacked or that electronic voting machines were compromised. The Clinton campaign on Wednesday did not respond to a request for comment as to whether it would petition for a recount before the three states’ fast-approaching deadlines to ask for one. President-elect Donald Trump won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by razor-thin margins and has a small lead in Michigan. All three states had been reliably Democratic in recent presidential elections. … Many election experts have called for routine post-election audits designed to boost public confidence in vote outcomes, by guarding against both tampering and natural vote-counting mistakes. These could involve spot-checks of the voting records and ballots, typically in randomly selected precincts, to make sure that votes were accurately recorded.

National: Clinton camp remains mum as 3-state recount urged over hacking questions | The New York Times

Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is growing. She is roughly 30,000 votes behind Donald Trump in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin, a combined gap that is narrowing. Some of her impassioned supporters are urging her to challenge the results in those two states and Pennsylvania, grasping at the last straws to reverse Trump’s decisive majority in the Electoral College. In recent days, the supporters have seized on a report by a respected computer scientist and other experts suggesting that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the keys to Trump’s Electoral College victory, need to manually review paper ballots to ensure the election was not hacked. “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack?” J. Alex Halderman, a computer-science professor at the University of Michigan who has studied the vulnerabilities of election systems at length, wrote on the online-publishing platform Medium on Wednesday as the calls based on his conclusions mounted. “Probably not.” More likely, he wrote, pre-election polls were “systematically wrong.” But the only way to resolve the lingering questions would be to examine “paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states,” he wrote.

National: Closer Look Punches Holes in Swing-State Election Hacking Report | Scientific American