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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

Every time there’s an election, the topic of hacking one comes to the surface. During a presidential election, that conversation gets louder. Yet, even the elections held every two years see some sort of vote hacking coverage. But can you really hack an election? Maybe, but that depends on your goals. The topic of election hacking is different this year, and that’s because someone is actually hacking political targets. Adding fuel to the fire, on Aug. 12, 2016, during an event in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump warned the crowd that if he loses the battleground state, it’s because the vote was rigged. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion—and I really mean this, Pennsylvania—is if cheating goes on,” Trump said. This was no random remark either, Pennsylvania voting has been called in to question before. Such was the case when Republican supporters claimed Mitt Romney lost the state in 2008 due to fraud. When it comes to hacking elections, most people imagine voting machines compromised in such a way that a vote for candidate ‘A’ actually counts as a vote for candidate ‘B’ – or the votes just disappear.

National: ES&S Class Action Says Voting Machines Can Be Manipulated | Top Class Actions

October 5, 2016

A company that sells vote counting machines is facing a class action lawsuit that alleges its voting systems are subject to unnecessary monitoring and vulnerable to manipulation. Plaintiff Anthony I. Provitola filed the election class action lawsuit on Monday, claiming that this vulnerability in the voting system sold by Election Systems & Software LLC may put the outcome of the 2016 election at risk. According to the vote counting machine class action lawsuit, Election Systems has sold certain vote counting machines and election management systems to many jurisdictions since 2014. In addition to providing the mechanism by which to count and tabulate votes, Election Systems also provided software for the voting systems along with any software updates. “The principle/premise upon which this action is based is that no person or organization, directly or through software or device, should have or be allowed to have any opportunity to either monitor, observe, or have any other contact with the data representing votes in an election, other than persons and/or organizations specifically authorized by law to conduct the election,” the voting system class action lawsuit claims. Provitola states that Election Systems has made assurances online and through advertisements about its responsibility to safeguard democracy through the manner in which its software counts votes.

National: How Hackers Could Send Your Polling Station into Chaos | MIT Technology Review

October 5, 2016

Hackers looking to disrupt the election on November 8 could have better luck stealing your voter registration information than your ballot. Indeed, election security experts say Internet-connected voter registration databases could prove to be the biggest vulnerability this Election Day. They say election officials should develop contingency plans to safeguard their precincts from cyberattacks, like ensuring that there is a paper record or other kind of reliable backup of the voter database on hand at the polling station. During this election season we’ve seen cyberattacks on the e-mail servers of the Democratic National Committee and state voter registration databases, which have heightened concerns that a nation-state adversary like Russia could use the Internet to disrupt the U.S. elections in November.

National: Voter ID Laws May Keep Transgender Voters From the Polls | VoA News

October 5, 2016

Up to 34,000 transgender people in the United States could face problems voting in next month’s election because their ID cards do not match their gender, advocacy groups said, urging them to vote by mail to avoid being turned away at the polls. Transgender rights have come under increasing scrutiny in the United States with access to public bathrooms and health care dominating media coverage and political discourse in recent months. Thousands of transgender people, however, might be unable to vote in the November 8 presidential election in states with stringent voter ID laws, according to a report by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. “A transgender voter may show up at the poll with a valid ID, however if they have not been able to update the gender marker or photo on that ID, a poll worker may be confused and refuse them a ballot,” said Arli Christian, spokeswoman for the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE).

National: Can you hack the vote? Yes, but not how you might think | Network World

October 4, 2016

With Donald Trump already talking about the presidential election being rigged, Symantec has set up a simulated voting station that shows how electronic systems might be hacked to alter actual vote tallies for just a few hundred dollars. They found that while it’s possible to change the number of votes cast for each candidate, it would be very difficult to do so on a large enough scale to swing the election one way or the other. However, enough machines in random precincts could be provably compromised so that general public confidence in the official outcome would be undermined, says Samir Kapuria, Symantec’s senior vice president for cyber security. Using a voting-machine simulator that contains an aggregate of known vulnerabilities from real-world voting machines and some that Symantec found itself, Kapuria demonstrated several ways attackers could taint voting results.

National: DHS urges states to beef up election security | The Hill

The Department of Homeland Security on Saturday urged state election officials to seek assistance in boosting cyber security ahead of November’s elections, after hackers tapped into voter registration systems in a small number of states. In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said 21 states have sought the Department’s assistance to improve cyber security. Johnson said hackers have been scanning state computer systems, a possible prelude to actual cyber attacks. “These challenges aren’t just in the future — they are here today,” Johnson said. “We must remain vigilant and continue to address these challenges head on. Before November 8, I urge state and local election officials to seek our cybersecurity assistance.” At least four states have had voter registration systems hacked in recent weeks. Officials in Arizona and Illinois said their systems had been improperly accessed this summer, and ABC News reported Thursday that at least two other voter registration systems were compromised. But those voter registration systems are distinct from vote tabulation systems, which county, local and state election officials maintain independently of internet-based systems. That makes the tabulation system much more difficult to hack, experts say, without physical access to the tightly guarded voting machines themselves.

National: Cyberattack threatens U.S. voting | Boston Herald

“There is a risk at large here,” Symantec Senior Vice President Samir Kapuria said. According to Symantec, the simple technological hardware in voting machines makes it relatively easy to take down a whole system of machines at a voting location. Many electronic voting systems have a cartridge in the back that holds ballot information. It’s basically a USB drive. “If somebody was really nefarious and put some tailor-made malware on one of those cartridges, that would walk from an individual system back to the nest,” Kapuria said. The problem becomes even worse when you consider that many locations do not keep a paper trail of voter receipts. There’s no simple solution to this problem, especially given that different counties and states use different types of voting machines.

National: Why Trump wants his supporters to monitor the polls in ‘certain areas’ | CS Monitor

Donald Trump renewed calls this weekend for supporters to travel to precincts outside their own Nov. 8 to keep a vigilant eye out for voter fraud. “We don’t want to lose an election because you know what I’m talking about,” the Republican presidential candidate told an overwhelmingly white crowd in Manheim, Pa. on Saturday. “Because you know what? That’s a big, big problem, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places.” Saturday was the second night in a row Mr. Trump urged supporters to poll watch, adding on to his repeated warnings in August that the election is “rigged” because of voter fraud. But Trump’s exhortations concern voters’ rights advocates who fear amateur poll watchers could intimidate and even harass minority voters The conflict, then, shows the difficulty with the practice: can Republican poll watchers “safeguard democracy,” as one exponent in Louisville said in 2004, without reverting to voter intimidation, particularly if they raise challenges at polls based on voters’ race, religion, or ethnicity?

National: Senators: Some mail-in voter registration deadlines defy law | Associated Press

Two Democratic senators say nine states are violating federal law with their mail-in voter registration deadlines for the November election, potentially disenfranchising thousands of people by blocking applications as many as three days earlier than other states. U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Patrick Leahy of Vermont asked the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to intervene and work with election officials in those states to ensure compliance with the National Voting Rights Act. The states cited in their letter Thursday are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah and Washington. “The right to vote is too precious to have something so simple to fix potentially prevent so many Americans from participating in the upcoming Election,” the senators wrote. The calendar appears to be the culprit. The deadline for registering by mail under federal law — 30 days before the election — falls on a Sunday this year. The next day happens to be Columbus Day, when there will be no postal service, preventing registrations from being postmarked. All other states have adjusted their deadlines to account for the long holiday weekend, accepting registration applications postmarked by Tuesday, Oct. 11.

National: Some voters with disabilities say they are treated like ‘second-class citizens’ at the polls | Business Insider

… A new analysis of voter accessibility data by the disability advocacy group Ruderman Family Foundation reveals that impediments to entering polling locations, difficulty obtaining absentee ballots, inadequate training of poll workers, a lack of privacy while voting, among other problems, plague an estimated more than 3 million eligible voters with disabilities. If unaddressed, advocates say, these issues could impact nearly a quarter of voters this fall. In a white paper released by the foundation on Sept. 26, experts’ analysis of voter data suggests that as many as 10% of people with disabilities report difficulties trying to register to vote or obtain an absentee ballot, which eliminate the need to travel to polling locations. “It is fundamentally unfair for 20% of the American voting population to face barriers to a full and fair participation in their right to cast a vote,” Jay Ruderman, president of the foundation, said in a press release. “America should and can do better to include people with disabilities in our elections.”

National: How Columbus Day could disenfranchise thousands of voters | CS Monitor

Two Democratic senators have a new voting rights nemesis: Columbus Day. US Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Patrick Leahy of Vermont say the federal holiday could disenfranchise “hundreds of thousands” of Americans whose voter-registration applications wouldn’t be postmarked until after nine states’ deadlines to register by mail. In a letter addressed to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) Sept. 30, the senators asked the agency to work with election officials in the nine states to extend their deadlines past the October 10 Columbus Day holiday. The senators’ letter shows how voting rights advocates are “aggressively calling attention to any potential for disenfranchisement,” as the Associated Press’s Christina Cassidy writes, in the first presidential election since the Supreme Court watered down the Voting Rights Act in 2013. While courts have been asked to rule on controversial voter ID laws since then, the senators are also concerned about other ways Americans might not be able to vote. “The right to vote is too precious to have something so simple to fix potentially prevent so many Americans from participating in the upcoming Election,” wrote Mr. Schumer and Mr. Leahy in the letter.

National: Hackers have attempted more intrusions into voter databases, FBI director says | The Washington Post

Hackers have attempted more intrusions into voter registration databases since those reported this summer, the FBI director said Wednesday, and federal officials are urging state authorities to gird their systems against possible other attacks. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James B. Comey said that the bureau had detected scanning activities — essentially hackers scoping out a potential attack — as well as some actual attempted intrusions into voter registration databases. He said those attempts were beyond what had been made public in July and August, likely referring to hacking efforts in Illinois and Arizona, though he offered no other specifics. “We are urging the states just to make sure that their deadbolts are thrown and their locks are on, and to get the best information they can from” the Department of Homeland Security, he said.

National: The Computer Voting Revolution Is Already Crappy, Buggy, and Obsolete | Bloomberg

Six days after Memphis voters went to the polls last October to elect a mayor and other city officials, a local computer programmer named Bennie Smith sat on his couch after work to catch up on e-mail. The vote had gone off about as well as elections usually do in Memphis, which means not well at all. The proceedings were full of the technical mishaps that have plagued Shelby County, where Memphis is the seat, since officials switched to electronic voting machines in 2006. Servers froze, and the results were hours late. But experts at the county election commission assured both candidates and voters that the problems were minor and the final tabulation wasn’t affected. … Shelby County uses a GEMS tabulator—for Global Election Management System—which is a personal computer installed with Diebold software that sits in a windowless room in the county’s election headquarters. The tabulator is the brains of the system. It monitors the voting machines, sorts out which machines have delivered data and which haven’t, and tallies the results. As voting machines check in and their votes are included in the official count, each machine’s status turns green on the GEMS master panel. A red light means the upload has failed. At the end of Memphis’s election night in October 2015, there was no indication from the technician running Shelby County’s GEMS tabulator that any voting machine hadn’t checked in or that any votes had gone missing, according to election commission e-mails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek. Yet as county technicians followed up on the evidence from Smith’s poll-tape photo, they discovered more votes that never made it into the election night count, all from precincts with large concentrations of black voters.

National: U. S. appeals court leaves proof-of-citizenship voting requirement to federal panel | The Washington Post

A U.S. appeals court panel that barred Kansas, Alabama and Georgia from adding a proof-of-citizenship requirement to a federal voter registration form wrote Monday that federal law leaves it to a federal elections agency — not the states — to determine whether such a change is necessary. The 2-to-1 written opinion follows a Sept. 9 order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The panel wrote that although the document requirement “unquestionably” hinders voter registration groups ahead of the November elections, there was “precious little” evidence of voter fraud by noncitizens, the problem the states said the measure is intended to fight. The Kansas secretary of state had told the court that “between 2003 and 2015 eighteen noncitizens had tried to or successfully registered to vote. Only one of them attempted to use the Federal Form,” the judges wrote.

National: Hackers Target Election Systems in 20 States | NBC