National

In the wake of Hurricane Matthew, residents still struggling to return to their homes and assess the damage are facing another challenge: registering to vote before it’s too late. Nowhere is the issue more acute than in Florida, where a fight to extend that deadline has turned bitterly partisan and litigious. Some 1.5 million Floridians were placed under evacuation last week as the Category 4 hurricane bore down on the state’s coast, closing down county and state government services. After Gov. Rick Scott (R) refused to extend Tuesday’s deadline to register, a federal judge ruled against him, extending it at least until Wednesday and rebuking Scott’s decision as “irrational,” “nonsensical” and “poppycock.” “These voters have already had their lives (and, quite possibly, their homes) turned up-side down by Hurricane Matthew,” U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker wrote. “They deserve a break, especially one that is mandated by the United States Constitution.”

National: 3 ways big storms like Hurricane Matthew can impact an election | The Washington Post

Hurricane Matthew is significantly earlier in the election than Sandy was — early October vs. late October — and we still don’t know precisely how much it will affect Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. So it’s very early to talk about political implications. But given Florida’s status as a hugely important swing state (and even Georgia’s status as a surprising battleground), there will be plenty of debate about the political impact the storm could have come Nov. 8. And the political fight over it has already begun, with Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) on Thursday declining the request of Democrats to extend voter registration in that state. Here are three ways in which storms like this can affect elections — along with whether there’s evidence they actually do.

National: Could the U.S. election be hacked? | USA Today

The impact of Russian hacking on the upcoming presidential election was a topic in Sunday night’s debate, raising the question: Is the U.S. election hackable? Experts say at the national level, no. But there could be individual incidents that undermine faith in the system. There’s almost no danger the U.S. presidential election could be affected by hackers. It’s simply too decentralized and for the most part too offline to be threatened, according to the head of the FBI and several security experts. “National elections are conducted at the local level by local officials on equipment that they obtained locally,” so there’s no single point of vulnerability to tampering here, said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for elections accuracy. … The biggest question in the mind of voting security expert Joseph Kiniry is whether the 2016 election will be Y2K or Pearl Harbor.

National: Seven Reasons the New Russian Hack Announcement Is a Big Deal | Politico

It’s been buried under news of Donald Trump bragging about his ability to grab women by their genitals, but Friday afternoon’s news dump included a stunning declaration by the Department of Homeland Security: the first direct accusation from the Obama administration that Russia is trying to interfere with our elections. “The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations,” the statement said, concluding that “these thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.” After the Democratic National Committee hack and the scattered hacks of voting machines, and months of talk in the press and on Capitol Hill, the Obama administration has openly called out the Kremlin for meddling in the election. This was immediately followed by a new dump of documents from WikiLeaks, this time of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, and news that the Russian ambassador to the United Nations lodged a formal complaint with the organization when another official criticized Trump. And all of this comes against the backdrop of Trump’s constant and effusive praise for Vladimir Putin, as well as a steady stream of revelations about his campaign’s shady ties to Russia.

National: Is there any practical way for Republicans to replace Trump at this point? Not really | Los Angeles Times

Donald Trump’s lascivious boasts about groping women, a common refrain emerged Saturday: The GOP nominee should withdraw from the ticket. The pleas to step aside came from many corners of the GOP universe, including Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host, and South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a member of the Republican congressional leadership. Trump has so far defiantly rejected calls to withdraw. But even if Republicans managed to persuade him to bow out, their political headache would not suddenly vanish. An attempt to replace Trump on the ticket would pose staggering logistical hurdles. For one thing, Trump’s name will undoubtedly remain on the ballot. Across the country, election officials have already prepped and printed voting materials. Overseas and military voters must receive their ballots 45 days prior to the election, a deadline that passed last month.

National: Hacking the election: questions and answers | Phys.org

The US government’s accusation that Russian government-directed hacking aimed to disrupt the November election comes amid fears about the security of the voting process. The attacks have included breaches of emails of political organizations—blamed on Russia—as well as probes of state voter databases, for which US officials have said they cannot determine the source.
Here are some questions and answers: Can hackers affect the November election results? This is unlikely, voting experts say. There is no single, centralized hub to be hacked, and the system is comprised of over 100,000 precincts and polling places. “While no system is 100 percent hack-proof, elections in this country are secure, perhaps as secure as they’ve ever been,” David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research told a recent congressional hearing. “There isn’t a single or concentrated point of entry for a hacker.” … Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University who studies voting systems, told lawmakers the biggest vulnerability is voter registration databases. Wallach testified at a House of Representatives hearing on election security that such an effort “can selectively disenfranchise voters by deleting them from the database or otherwise introducing errors.”

National: Russia Hack of U.S. Politics Bigger Than Disclosed, Includes GOP | NBC

The Russian government’s cyber-espionage campaign against the American political system began more than a year ago and has been far more extensive than publicly disclosed, targeting hundreds of key people — Republicans and Democrats alike — whose work is considered strategically important to the Putin regime, official sources told NBC News. The targets over the past two years have included a Who’s Who of Hillary Clinton associates from her State Department tenure, the Clinton Foundation and her presidential campaign, as well as top Republicans and staffers for Republican candidates for president. Starting in earnest in 2015, Russian hackers used sophisticated “spearphishing” techniques to steal emails and other data from Capitol Hill staffers, operatives of political campaigns and party organizations, and other people involved in the election and foreign policy. That’s according to NBC News interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials, private sector cybersecurity experts and others familiar with the FBI-led investigation into the hacks.

National: Trump suggests illegal immigrants will vote as parties clash over voter access | The Washington Post

Donald Trump suggested without evidence Friday that the Obama administration was letting illegal immigrants into the country to vote — part of a series of unsubstantiated complaints by the GOP nominee that the election is “rigged” against him and that his backers should monitor polling locations in “certain areas.” Trump’s allegations were a dramatic escalation of the usual partisan warfare over ballot access issues and came as Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) denied a request by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to extend voter registration because of Hurricane Matthew. The storm caused the extension of voter registration deadlines in South Carolina, while officials in Georgia have urged residents in storm-affected areas to register online instead of going to registration centers.

National: Multiple threats to voting systems could influence outcomes | The Philadelphia Tribune

With the most volatile election in nearly 50 years about to take place in now less than 30 days, federal officials, voting modernization experts and civil rights activist are expressing enormous worry about the integrity of election systems on Nov. 8. Threats to voting systems and processes are not a new occurrence. Just less than 20 years ago, the Supreme Court ended up selecting the first American president of the 21st century after a hanging chad mishap in battleground state Florida put the nation in electoral suspense for months after the election. But there is considerable conversation among government officials on all levels, as well as cybersecurity experts and voting rights advocates that voting systems are facing multiple tracks of threats that could possibly shape outcomes on Election Day. The extent of those threats could also negatively impact Black and Latino voters in a number of key battleground states, including places like Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These are states where voters of color hold the key to determining who ends up in the White House. … U.S. voting infrastructure, according to the Brennan Center’s Christopher Famighetti, is woefully underfunded and dangerously outdated. “In November, 42 states will be using voting machines that are over 10 years old,” Famighetti warned in a conversation with the Tribune. “Thirteen states will be using machines 15 years or older. That’s close to the end of most voting systems life span. We wouldn’t expect our desktop or laptop to last for 10 years.”

National: Nine states shorten deadline for voter registration | The Washington Post

Nine states have shortened the time still allowed for voters to register for the November election, in some cases designating as the last day to register the Columbus Day federal holiday when government offices are closed. Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) said that the states — Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah and Washington — could be in violation of the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to accept registration forms if they were postmarked 30 days before Election Day, because their deadline is on a weekend day without postal service or on a holiday. In a Sept. 30 letter to the federal Election Assistance Commission, the senators urged the EAC to take action to ensure that the states change voter-registration deadlines that fall before Oct. 11 to comply with federal law. The EAC was established in 2002 to help states run elections and to disseminate the federal online voting form. “We know that every day of voter registration in the month before the election is an opportunity for hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country to get registered to vote or update their voter registration information,” the senators wrote.

National: US officially accuses Russia of hacking DNC and interfering with election | The Guardian

The US government has formally accused Russia of hacking the Democratic party’s computer networks and said that Moscow was attempting to “interfere” with the US presidential election. Hillary Clinton and US officials have blamed Russian hackers for stealing more than 19,000 emails from Democratic party officials, but Friday’s announcement marked the first time that the Obama administration has pointed the finger at Moscow. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” said the office of the director of national intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)in a joint statement. The accusation marked a new escalation of tensions with Russia and came shortly after the US secretary of state, John Kerry, called for Russia to be investigated for war crimes in Syria.

National: 5 ways to improve voting security in the US | PCWorld

With the U.S. presidential election just weeks away, questions about election security continue to dog the nation’s voting system. It’s too late for election officials to make major improvements, “and there are no resources,” said Joe Kiniry, a long-time election security researcher. However, officials can take several steps for upcoming elections, security experts say. “Nobody should ever imagine changing the voting technology used this close to a general election,” said Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa. “The best time to buy new equipment would be in January after a general election, so you’ve got almost two years to learn how to use it.” … Some states conduct extensive pre-election tests of their voting equipment, but other tests are less comprehensive, said Pamela Smith, president of elections security advocacy group Verified Voting. Most jurisdictions conduct pre-election voting tests, but many “randomly select some machines” after ballot information, such as candidates’ names, is programmed in, Smith said. Testing all voting machines before an election would be more secure, she said.

National: States Keep Weaseling Around Court Orders Blocking GOP Voting Restrictions | TPM

After a spree of favorable court rulings that softened or blocked Republican-passed voting restrictions, voting rights advocates are engaged in a new phase of trench warfare with a mere month left before November’s election and early voting in some places already underway. There was no time for civil rights groups to rest on their laurels after winning the high-profile legal challenges. In many states, such rulings were met with attempts to undermine or circumvent court orders meant to make it easier to vote. “You take a step back and it’s really appalling,” said Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project who has been involved in many of the legal challenges to state voting restrictions. “I mean the Department of Justice and other groups, we have all won the cases … you would have thought we would have been finished with this whole thing, when, up until Election Day, we have to stay on these people,” Ho told TPM. At times, it’s hard to pin down whether issues red states have faced in implementing court orders have been motivated by bureaucratic incompetence or something worse. But the pattern is undeniable. In almost every state where voting rights advocates have scored a major legal victory in recent months, they have had to threaten to drag state officials back into court over the shoddy job election administrators have done following the rulings.

National: Voter ID laws threaten lifelong voters | BBC

67-year-old Leroy Switlick is angry. He’s angry because he’s made three separate trips to the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) office in Milwaukee to get a photo ID so he can vote in next month’s general election. Each time he’s come away empty-handed. Leroy has voted in every presidential election for more than 40 years, but Wisconsin’s new voter ID law means that even though he’s registered, he will not be able to cast his ballot without showing photo ID such as a driving licence or passport. “It’s silly,” he says. Switlick, who has been partially sighted for most of his life, never learned to drive – and so never had a driver’s license. He was not previously required to have a state-issued ID for any other purpose. “The first question the man behind the counter asked me was ‘Can I see your photo ID?’ Now if I’m coming to get a photo ID, how can I already have a photo ID?” Each time he visited the DMV, he took a satchel full of documents including his birth certificate. But the DMV never actually examined his papers.

National: Why 10% of Florida Adults Can’t Vote: How Felony Convictions Affect Access to the Ballot | The New York Times

One of every 40 American adults cannot vote in November’s election because of state laws that bar people with past felony convictions from casting ballots. Experts say racial disparities in sentencing have had a disproportionate effect on the voting rights of blacks and Hispanics. A report by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization focused on criminal justice reform, estimates that 6.1 million Americans will not be allowed to vote next month because of these laws. State laws that bar voting vary widely. Three swing states — Florida, Iowa and Virginia — have some of the harshest laws; they impose a lifetime voting ban on felons, although their voting rights can be restored on a case-by-case basis by a governor or a court. On the other end of the spectrum, Maine and Vermont place no restrictions on people with felony convictions, allowing them to vote while incarcerated.

National: Foreign election observers to cast their eyes on the U.S. presidential vote | The Washington Post

The world will be watching from close-up when the United States chooses a president next month, as foreign election observers fan out to polling places across the country. For the first time, the Organization of American States (OAS) will dispatch 30 to 40 observers and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which has been sending small groups of observers to U.S. elections since 2002, hopes to boost its contingent dramatically, fielding hundreds of poll watchers. Even Russia, where 63 U.S. observers traveled for parliamentary elections last month, is considering sending people to watch Americans vote, according to Yury Melnik, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington. The plethora of poll watchers — some of whom are veteran monitors of elections in countries where voter fraud is rampant — is another sign that the 2016 contest is unlike any other.

National: Computer Science Professor: Many hurdles preventing emergence of online voting | Purdue Exponent

The search for solutions to increase voter numbers on Election Day continues as states have underwhelming turnouts in both presidential and non-presidential election years. But Eugene Spafford, computer science professor at Purdue, says online voting is not one of those solutions. The most important aspects of an election are privacy and accuracy for citizens and, from the standpoint of candidates, the vote total accountability. However, current online technology available to the average citizen dictates that you can’t have it all, says Spafford, the executive director of Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. “Voting by Internet sounds attractive, but either we have to give up the anonymity of the ballot, which is not a good practice, or we have to give up the ability to confirm that the count is correct,” he said in a press release.

National: Designing a Better Ballot | The Atlantic

Voter turnout in the United States is abysmal, far worse than it is in most other developed countries. In 2014, U.S. voter participation was the lowest it had been in more than 70 years—with less than half the population voting in 43 states. In general elections, for which voter turnout is typically highest, there are still some 88 million adults in the United States who are eligible to vote, but don’t. Even among those who do vote, an alarming number of ballots don’t end up getting counted. In each of the presidential elections that took place between 1992 and 2004, according to a 2005 analysis in the University of Chicago’s Journal of Politics, more than 2 million votes were cast but never tallied—totaling nearly 9 million votes that went uncounted because they were blank, marked incorrectly, or otherwise spoiled. “It’s a wicked problem,” says Whitney Quesenbery, a co-director at the Center for Civic Design. “We’ve always been in this battle between good, fast, and easy—but still accurate, reliable, accessible and all those other good things voting needs to be.”

National: In a year of Trump and new voting laws, U.S. government will ‘severely’ limit election observers | The Washington Post

The Justice Department is significantly reducing the number of federal observers stationed inside polling places in next month’s election at the same time that voters will face strict new election laws in more than a dozen states. These laws, including requirements to present certain kinds of photo identification, are expected to lead to disputes at the polls. Adding to the potential for confusion, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for his supporters to police the polls themselves for fraud. For the past five decades, the Justice Department has sent hundreds of observers and poll monitors across the country to ensure that voters are not intimidated or discriminated against when they cast their ballots. But U.S. officials say that a 2013 Supreme Court decision now limits the federal government’s role inside polling places on Election Day. “In the past, we have . . . relied heavily on election observers, specially trained individuals who are authorized to enter polling locations and monitor the process to ensure that it lives up to its legal obligations,” Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch told a Latino civil rights group over the summer. “Our ability to deploy them has been severely curtailed.”

National: If the election is hacked, we may never know | Computerworld

The upcoming U.S. presidential election can be rigged and sabotaged, and we might never even know it happened. This Election Day voters in 10 states, or parts of them, will use touch-screen voting machines with no paper backup of an individual’s vote; some will have rewritable flash memory. If malware is inserted into these machines that’s smart enough to rewrite itself, votes can be erased or assigned to another candidate with little possibility of figuring out the actual vote. In precincts where vote tallies raise suspicions, computer scientists will be called in the day after the election to conduct forensics. But even if a hack is suspected, or proven, it would likely be impossible to do anything about it. If the voting machine firmware doesn’t match what the vendor supplied, “it’s like you burned all the ballots,” said Daniel Lopresti, a professor and chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “We have no way to confirm that we can really trust the output from the machine,” he said.

National: 3 nightmare election hack scenarios | CSO Online

The question on the mind of many voting security experts is not whether hackers could disrupt a U.S. election. Instead, they wonder how likely an election hack might be and how it might happen. The good news is a hack that changes the outcome of a U.S. presidential election would be difficult, although not impossible. First of all, there are technology challenges — more than 20 voting technologies are used across the country, including a half dozen electronic voting machine models and several optical scanners, in addition to hand-counted paper ballots. But the major difficulty of hacking an election is less a technological challenge than an organizational one, with hackers needing to marshal and manage the resources needed to pull it off, election security experts say. And a handful of conditions would need to fall into place for an election hack to work. Many U.S. voting systems still have vulnerabilities, and many states use statistically unsound election auditing practices, said Joe Kiniry, a long-time election security researcher. “With enough money and resources, I don’t think [hacking the election] is actually a technical challenge,” said Kiniry, now CEO and chief scientist at Free and Fair, an election technology developer. “It’s a social, a political, and an infrastructural challenge because you’d have a medium-sized conspiracy to achieve such a goal. Technically, it’s not rocket science.”

National: The threat to our voting system that’s more likely than hacking | PBS

Earlier this year, the Democratic National Committee was hacked, and some of its private emails were released to the public. Last week, the FBI confirmed that hackers targeted voter registration systems in 20 states. But most voting systems are not connected to the internet, which means they’re less prone to hacking. In fact, a 2014 report by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, says the biggest threat on Election Day is not hackers — it’s outdated equipment. This November, 42 states will use machines that are more than a decade old, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Machines in 14 states, including Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Texas and Virginia are in some cases more than 15 years old. States are increasingly reporting vulnerabilities, such as worn-out modems used to transmit election results, failing central processing units and unsupported memory cards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reported.

National: Hacking an election is about influence and disruption, not voting machines | PCWorld