National

Imagine it: It’s election night, and the results are starting to trickle in. Then, just as the electoral picture is beginning to come into focus, large voting precincts in critical swing states begin to experience problems. Voter registration databases are inaccessible to election officials, and even the websites where results are posted come crashing down. The culprit? It’s ransomware — specifically Maze ransomware. This is a nightmare scenario, but one that Chase Cunningham, principal analyst and vice president serving security and risk professionals for Forrester, says could really happen… “I think there should be a whole lot more worry about it,” says Cunningham. “I think we’re going to see a ransomware event in a major district, and it’s going to cause civil unrest. Of all the things that concern me about the election cycle, that is the one that keeps me awake at night.” Maze ransomware, a new type of threat discovered in 2019, is a major point of concern. Here’s what state, county and local officials need to know about the threat, why voting systems are particularly vulnerable and what can be done to protect their systems before Nov. 3.

Full Article: How Maze Ransomware Threatens Voter Databases | StateTech Magazine

National: Trump campaign site hack shows risks of even low-grade election interference | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

A brief but colorful breach of President Trump’s campaign website is underscoring how even unsophisticated efforts at election interference can rattle voters and undermine the democratic process. Officials and experts were eager to put the breach into context in the final week of the election – during which millions of Americans are expected to flock to the websites of candidates and state and local election offices for last-minute information before casting their ballots. Chris Krebs, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s election security division, sought to tamp down concern and called it an effort to “distract, sensationalize, and confuse” and to “undermine your confidence in our voting process.” The hackers managed to deface the site’s “About” page for several minutes, replacing it with a screed that claimed in broken English and without evidence to have compromising information about the president and his family culled from multiple hacked devices. “[T]he world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump,” read the message, which also included FBI and Justice Department seals. “[I]t is time to allow the world to know truth.”

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Trump campaign site hack shows risks of even low-grade election interference – The Washington Post

National: ‘Ripe for error’: Ballot signature verification is flawed — and a big factor in the election | Maya Lau and Laura J. Nelson/Los Angeles Times

Mail-in ballots are pouring in by the millions to election offices across the country, getting stacked and prepared for processing. But before the count comes the signature test. Election workers eyeball voter signatures on ballots one by one, comparing the loop of an “L” or the squiggle of an “S” against other samples of that person’s writing. When performed by professionals in criminal cases or legal proceedings, signature verification can take hours. But election employees in many states must do the job in as little as five seconds. In an election marked by uncertainty amid the pandemic, the signature verification process represents one of the biggest unknowns: whether a system riddled with vulnerabilities will work on such a massive scale. In 2016, mismatched signatures were the most common reason that mail ballots were rejected, according to federal officials. With record numbers of people voting by mail this cycle, ballots thrown out for signature problems and other issues have the potential to decide races where the margin of victory is slim. Candidates could mount legal battles over the verification process to challenge election outcomes. President Trump has repeatedly asserted, with no evidence, that mail-in voting is rife with fraud.

Full Article: 2020 election: How does voter signature verification work? – Los Angeles Times

National: How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge | Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny/NBC

One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China. The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents. The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen’s profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer said that no one by that name had ever worked for the company and that no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches. One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist. Despite the document’s questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.

Full Article: How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge

‘Perception Hacks’ and Other Potential Threats to the Election | David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth/The New York Times

In Georgia, a database that verifies voter signatures was locked up by Russian hackers in a ransomware attack that also dumped voters’ registration data online. In California and Indiana, Russia’s most formidable state hackers, a unit linked to the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., bored into local networks and hit some election systems, though it is still unclear why. In Louisiana, the National Guard was called in to stop cyberattacks aimed at small government offices that employed tools previously seen only in attacks by North Korea. And on Tuesday night, someone hacked the Trump campaign, defacing its website with a threatening message in broken English warning that there would be more to come. None of these attacks amounted to much. But from the sprawling war room at United States Cyber Command to those monitoring the election at Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft, experts are watching closely for more “perception hacks.” Those are smaller attacks that can be easily exaggerated into something bigger and potentially seized upon as evidence that the whole voting process is “rigged,” as President Trump has claimed it will be.

Full Article: ‘Perception Hacks’ and Other Potential Threats to the Election – The New York Times

National: ‘Tsunamis of Misinformation’ Overwhelm Local Election Officials | Kellen Browning and Davey Alba/The New York Times

The morning after last month’s presidential debate, the phones inside the Philadelphia election offices that Al Schmidt helps oversee rang off the hook. One caller asked whether President Trump’s comments hinting at rampant voter fraud in Philadelphia were true. Another yelled about the inaccurate rumor that poll watchers were being barred from polling places. Still another demanded to know what the city was trying to hide. It was just another day at the office for Mr. Schmidt, one of Philadelphia’s three city commissioners, a job that includes supervising voter registration and elections. Hundreds of people have called in every day for months, many parroting conspiracy theories about the election and lies about how partisan megadonors own the voting machines. Staff members spend hours shooting down the rumors, he said. “It’s not like we have tens of millions of dollars to spend on communications to battle tsunamis of misinformation that come our way,” said Mr. Schmidt, 49, whose team has been working up to 17-hour days ahead of Election Day on Tuesday. “It wears on all of us.” Election officials across the country are already stretched thin this year, dealing with a record number of mail-in ballots and other effects of the coronavirus pandemic. On top of that, many are battling another scourge: misinformation.

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National: A Journey into the Heart of America’s Voting Paranoia | Tim Alberta/Politico

Shelby Watchilla leaned forward, her amber hair brushing against the plexiglass barrier, lowering her voice so that it was barely audible from behind her blue mask. “Listen, there’s nobody in the world who wants the truth out there more than I do,” she said.A kind-eyed woman in her mid-40s, Watchilla glanced around nervously. She nodded toward the cameras overhead and the employees glancing in our direction. “The investigation is technically ongoing,” she said, her tone equal parts caution and desperation. “I don’t know why. But I’m not allowed to talk until it’s over.”Three weeks earlier, Watchilla had been just another obscure civil servant. As the director of elections for Luzerne County, a federation of hill country hamlets in northeastern Pennsylvania, she was one of the thousands of local officials across America responsible for running elections. Watchilla, who had been on the job just under a year, circulated details on rules and regulations and deadlines; registered new voters; collected and counted ballots; and as a general matter did whatever necessary, in a year plagued by confusion and disinformation surrounding elections, to distinguish fact from fiction.

Full Article: A Journey into the Heart of America’s Voting Paranoia – POLITICO

National: Six Republican Secretaries Of State Tried To Stop Facebook’s Effort To Register Millions Of Voters | Ryan Mac and Craig Silvermann/BuzzFeed

On Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major milestone for what he called “the largest voting information campaign in US history.” Launched in August with the goal of registering 4 million Americans to vote, Facebook claimed the effort garnered an estimated 4.4 million registrations across the company’s social media platforms, based on conversion rates the company calculated from “a few states it had partnered with.” “Voting is voice,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post to the company’s internal message board, specifically thanking Facebook’s civic engagement and civic integrity teams. What he didn’t mention, however, was the resistance the voting information campaign faced from Republican-led secretaries of state. In September, Facebook received a strongly worded letter signed by the secretaries of state of Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, asking the company to discontinue its Voting Information Center. It argued election officials alone are “legally and morally responsible to our citizens” and said Facebook has “no such accountability.” “While such goals may be laudable on their face, the reality is that the administration of elections is best left to the states,” read the letter, which was addressed to Zuckerberg. “The Voting Information Center is redundant and duplicative of what we, as chief election officials, have been doing for decades.” The six Republican secretaries of state warned that the voting information center could foster “misinformation and confusion.”

Full Article: Republican States Tried To Stop Facebook’s Effort To Register Voters

Meet the Poll Heroes, America’s next generation of poll workers | Miguel Amaya/ABC7

The nationwide shortage of poll workers has inspired a young generation of Americans to step up to the front lines of the election process. Through The Poll Hero Project, founded by a group of students at Princeton University, Denver East High School, and the University of Chicago, thousands of college and high school students are being recruited to serve as paid poll workers in the upcoming election. “Most poll workers are typically over the age of 60, so they are a lot more vulnerable to COVID-19. We’ve expanded nationally to try and recruit poll workers everywhere,” said 19-year-old Kai Tsurumaki, a student at Princeton University and co-founder of the Poll Hero Project. The project, which initially focused on federal funding for vote-by-mail efforts, shifted its mission to recruiting poll workers once the nationwide shortage became evident. Through their recruitment efforts and outreach, The Poll Hero Project estimates that they have been able to register over 32,500 poll workers.

Full Article: Meet the Poll Heroes, America’s next generation of poll workers – ABC7 New York

Cybersecurity and U.S. Election Infrastructure | Helen You/Foreign Policy

´As voters head to the polls for the 2020 elections, the U.S. faces on-going security threats such as disinformation campaigns, data breaches, and ballot tampering in an effort by foreign adversaries to erode the integrity of the democratic process. Recent events from Russian and Iranian hackers stealing data to threaten and intimidate voters to Russian actors actively targeting state, local, and territorial networks demonstrate that elections rely on crucial technological tools to ensure process integrity, the disruption of which would have a debilitating impact on national security and society.Critical infrastructure (CI) provides essential services and is the backbone of the country’s economy, security, and health. From transportation enabling personal mobility and commerce, to electricity powering our homes and businesses, to telecommunications networks fostering global connectivity—particularly amid the pandemic—CI is the lynchpin to functioning social, economic, and political systems. While these systems have long been subject to threats from terrorism and natural disasters, cyberattacks represent among the most destabilizing and underappreciated risk. With the rapid digitalization of all facets of society and increasing dependence on information and communications technologies (ICT), attackers ranging from nation-states to hacktivists to organized criminal groups can identify vulnerabilities and infiltrate seemingly disparate systems to disrupt services and damage global society—all without a physical attack. As a designated CI subsector, election systems are vital to domestic and international security (see U.N. nonbinding consensus report A/70/174) and election security risks can threaten democracies worldwide.

Full Article: Cybersecurity and U.S. Election Infrastructure – Foreign Policy

National: Jeering sign-wavers. Caravans of honking trucks. Voter intimidation or free speech? | Abigail Hauslohner/The Washington Post

Source: Jeering sign-wavers. Caravans of honking trucks. Voter intimidation or free speech? – The Washington Post

Jeering sign-wavers, caravans of honking trucks flying Trump 2020 flags, and charged political rhetoric — delivered via bullhorn at people waiting in line at polling sites — have become the increasingly common backdrop to early voting across the country, particularly in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. Some of the loud displays, often from supporters of President Trump and particularly frustrating to Democrats, have prompted local law enforcement agencies to station officers near polling places to keep the peace. In some locations, they have sparked allegations of voter intimidation and fears of tinderbox confrontations on the cusp of escalation in the run-up to Election Day next week. “I do think activities like that can be intimidating, and especially an activity where we have seen violence associated with Trump caravans,” said Lindsay Schubiner, the program director at the Western States Center, a progressive nonprofit focused on far-right extremism. The center is based in Portland, Ore., where a Trump supporter was killed on a public street in August when a self-described antifa adherent shot him after a Trump caravan spilled into a crowd of racial justice protesters.

National: One week out, election IT officials project calm, with caution | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

For many, the final week leading up to Election Day will be spent doomscrolling through poll results, enduring wall-to-wall campaign ads during every television commercial break and nervously refreshing some number-crunching Electoral College forecast. But as Election Day draws near, the IT and cybersecurity officials backstopping their states’ voting processes are projecting much more calm than your Facebook feed or family group text. “The technical pieces are in place, the planning is in place,” said Jeff Franklin, the chief cybersecurity officer in the office of Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate. “We’re checking the locks on the doors and that the windows are shut and walking through that checklist.” Within the election security community, if the 2018 midterms — the first nationwide vote since the federal government declared elections to be critical infrastructure — were the “dress rehearsal,” 2020 has been considered the “big show.” In just the past few weeks, U.S. officials, led by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, have pumped out multiple alerts, including warnings that a Russia-linked hacking group has breached state and local networks and blaming Iran for a string of threatening emails to voters. And while the overall level of malicious cyber activity appears to be down from 2016, other threats, like misinformation and disinformation, still abound.

Full Article: One week out, election IT officials project calm, with caution

National: The lowly DDoS attack is still a viable threat for undermining elections | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

Scenes like what happened to Florida’s voter registration site on Oct. 6 has played out over and over again: A system goes down, and questions fly. Was there a cyberattack, specifically a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack meant to overwhelm a website site with traffic, knocking it offline? Could there have been too many legitimate visitors rushing to the site to beat the voter registration deadline — that surged past what the system could handle? Or, was it something weirder, as in this case, like pop singer Ariana Grande urging fans on Twitter to register to vote? Florida’s chief information officer eventually blamed misconfigured computer servers. The incident, though, was one of several over the course of the past month that exposed ongoing anxieties about how cyberattacks, accidental outages and other technical failures could upend a polling place, or even an election. Few, if any, election security experts would rank the relatively antiquated technique of DDoS attacks as one of the top couple threats, particularly compared to ransomware or disinformation. Still, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security on Sept. 30 issued a warning about DDoS election threats. And Google, in an Oct. 16 report, said it was watching government-backed hacking groups build their abilities to conduct large-scale DDoS attacks in recent years.

Full Article: The lowly DDoS attack is still a viable threat for undermining elections – CyberScoop

National: U.S. Homeland Security agency faulted for election planning around potential violence | Raphael Satter and Christopher Bing/Reuters

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog body said on Tuesday that officials at its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had not adequately planned for potential violence at polling places and vote counting stations. The watchdog’s report, issued with a week to go before the Nov. 3, comes as the threat of violence has crept up the national agenda. Recent Reuters reporting has highlighted how everyone from retailers (here to social media companies here) has begun making contingency plans should the election turn chaotic or violent. The shift in attention comes after years of election-related anxiety revolving around the integrity of vote tallying machines and electronic poll books or the threat of foreign disinformation carried by social media. The DHS Office of the Inspector General noted that the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – the DHS arm generally responsible for protecting U.S. infrastructure from digital and physical threats – offers an array of cybersecurity support to state and local governments.

Full Article: U.S. Homeland Security agency faulted for election planning around potential violence | Reuters

National: Courts rule election money from Facebook founder will stay despite conservative attempts to reverse it | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Courts rule election money from Facebook founder will stay despite conservative attempts to reverse it – The Washington Post

Federal judges have so far declined to halt $400 million in grants to city and county election administrators from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, despite a conservative law firm’s efforts to overturn them. The grants from the Facebook founder and his wife, delivered by the nonprofit Center for Technology and Civic Life, are aimed at helping cash-strapped counties hire more poll workers, provide personal protective equipment and manage a surge in mail voting during the pandemic. Lawyers for the Thomas More Society don’t object to those goals, but they argued the grants were strategically awarded to boost voter turnout in urban centers and Democratic strongholds and to disadvantage Republicans. But federal judges have declined to halt the funding to counties in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, Iowa and South Carolina, saying they see no partisan tilt in the grants, which were also given to many rural and Republican counties. CTCL delivered the grants to more than 2,300 election departments using a formula that links funding to the district’s voting population. “The truth is that plaintiffs — like all residents of the counties — stand to benefit from the additional resources for safe and efficient voting provided by CTCL grants,” Judge Amos L. Mazzant III noted in denying an injunction on grants to counties that include the cities of Houston and Dallas.

National: Police Struggle to Protect Voters and Avoid Intimidation at Polls | Joe Barrett and Zusha Elinson/Wall Street Journal

States and cities across the U.S. are wrestling with a delicate task as they gear up for the possibility of violence on Election Day: how to keep voters safe without deploying a police presence that could intimidate some voters. So far, authorities have taken different approaches. Michigan has moved to ban firearms at the polls after armed protests took place at the state capitol. Police in New York City plan to boost their presence in and around polling sites. While a number of states ban police at the polls unless they are asked to help with a particular situation by election officials, some are encouraging officers to be nearby, but not at, election sites. The concern among law-enforcement officials is that efforts to protect voters put them in the position of policing the polls, a practice that historically has been discouraged or even forbidden by law. “The last thing we want are the police in the polling stations,” said Robert Stevenson, executive director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police.

National: Coronavirus cases are surging again. These states have refused to loosen rules on who can vote by mail. | Elise Viebeck and Arelis R. Hernández/The Washington Post

Coronavirus cases are rising again in Texas, but most voters fearful of infection are not allowed to cast ballots by mail. For the limited number who qualify with a separate excuse, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott restricted drop-off locations to one per county. And when the Democratic stronghold of Harris County took steps to make voting easier, GOP leaders sued local officials. Texas is one of five red states that emerged as conspicuous holdouts this year as the rest of the country rushed to loosen voting rules because of the coronavirus pandemic. Most of the roughly 30 million registered voters who live there, and in Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee have no choice but to cast ballots in person this fall, even as the rate of coronavirus in the United States approaches its third peak. The situation underscores how the nation’s decentralized election systems and Republican opposition to mail voting this year are translating into vastly different voting experiences for Americans, depending on where they live. Legal challenges to the voting limits have foundered in some courts, rejected by a federal judiciary that has shifted rightward under President Trump.

National: How battleground states process mail ballots – and why it may mean delayed results | Quinn Scanlan/ABC

Every American would be wise to take the mantra “patience is a virtue” to heart as the results start coming in on election night this November because it may be a lot slower than they’ve become accustomed to. Because of the pandemic, more voters are opting to cast their ballots by mail this year. While the expanded access and increased use of mail-in voting is good for voters, it does create hardships for already strained election officials in many states, including key battlegrounds. And every ballot — or nearly every ballot — may need to be counted in the states where the presidential contest is expected to be the closest before anyone can responsibly make a projection on who won the state. There are battleground states that were better equipped to handle the expected influx in mail-in ballots. Arizona and Florida, for example, already had a significant portion of the electorate that voted by mail prior to this year, and their state laws reflected that — giving officials more time to process those ballots ahead of Election Day.

National: Missing From Supreme Court’s Election Cases: Reasons for Its Rulings | Adam Liptak/The New York Times

At least nine times since April, the Supreme Court has issued rulings in election disputes. Or perhaps “rulings” is too generous a word for those unsigned orders, which addressed matters as consequential as absentee voting during the pandemic in Alabama, South Carolina and Texas, and the potential disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of people with felony convictions in Florida.Most of the orders, issued on what scholars call the court’s “shadow docket,” did not bother to supply even a whisper of reasoning. “This idea of unexplained, unreasoned court orders seems so contrary to what courts are supposed to be all about,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard. “If courts don’t have to defend their decisions, then they’re just acts of will, of power. They’re not even pretending to be legal decisions.” The orders were responses to emergency applications, and they were issued quickly, without full briefing or oral arguments (hence the “shadow docket”). Compare the shadow docket with the court’s regular docket, the one with real briefs, arguments and elaborate signed opinions. On that docket — the “merits docket” — the court ordinarily agrees to hear about 1 percent of the petitions asking it to intercede. In its last term, it decided just 53 merits cases.

National Cities Gird for Election Day Unrest | Danielle Moran , Laura Bliss , and Sarah Holder/Bloomberg

Fears of voter intimidation and civil unrest have prompted authorities in large urban centers to announce unprecedented steps meant to avoid clashes on Election Day and beyond.Chicago, Philadelphia and New York are among cities that have revealed plans to prevent violence on Nov. 3, when election observers worry polling sites could be targeted, or in the weeks that follow if historic levels of mail-in ballots preclude the declaration of an immediate winner. What’s less known is how smaller communities are preparing, even those that have seen some of the most intense violence by armed vigilantes during racial justice demonstrations — either because authorities have made no special preparations or don’t want to show their hand. Unfounded assertions of fraud by President Donald Trump and his supporters had raised the specter of such unrest even before 14 men were recently charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and overthrow the state’s government. “We have concerns that these same groups might decide that they need to take it upon themselves to go to polls and protect against a fraudulent or rigged election,” said Mary McCord, legal director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, at a press conference earlier this month. McCord has been advising cities, state attorneys general, and law enforcement about laws criminalizing private militia activity and how to enforce them.

National: Election Officials Warn of Widespread Suspicious Email Campaign | Robert McMillan and Dustin Volz/Wall Street Journal

Local U.S. election officials have been receiving suspicious emails that appear to be part of a widespread and potentially malicious campaign targeting several states, according to a private alert about the activity. In some of the emails, the sender impersonated state election directors and asked that the voting officials click on a link to receive special two-factor authentication hardware, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an information sharing group for election officials, said in the alert Friday. While tricking users into clicking malicious links is a technique commonly used to hack into computer systems, the group, known as the EI-ISAC, didn’t find malicious links or attachments in most of the email samples it analyzed. Other emails deemed suspicious by the EI-ISAC purported to be from people with disabilities looking for ways to vote from home. “Some of these emails were designed to mimic standard correspondence that election officials would expect to receive…which increases the risk that an official might click a malicious link,” the alert said.”

National: The Real Threat of Foreign Interference Comes After Election Day – Americans Are Primed to Accept Their Adversaries’ Narrative of Doubt | Laura Rosenberger/Foreign Affairs

With just days to go before the U.S. presidential election, Americans are once again scrolling through news feeds full of stories about foreign operations that seek to undermine their country’s electoral process. Some of the reports raise questions about whether the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is politicizing these concerns—and the president himself has cast doubt on the integrity of the election. Americans are left wondering what to make of all the noise. The good news is that the United States is better prepared to address many such threats than it was four years ago: its intelligence community, private companies, and independent researchers have met interference attempts with early detection, exposure, and countermeasures, and they have acted particularly effectively to secure U.S. election infrastructure. But Americans should be prepared for foreign actors to take some of their most significant actions in the days and weeks after Election Day—when the country may actually be most vulnerable.

National: Early voting could hit record-smashing 100 million by Election Day | Allan Smith/NBC

With eight days to go until Election Day, 62 million voters have cast ballots early, surpassing the total number in 2016 by more than 12 million, according to NBC News Decision Desk/Target Smart. The number of early voters could hit 90 million to 100 million before Nov. 3 — about twice the 50 million who voted early in 2016, the Decision Desks projects. TargetSmart is a Democratic political data firm that provides voting data to NBC News. In critical swing states, expanded early voting and vote-by-mail options have led to a large increase in pre-election voting. In battleground Pennsylvania, about 1.4 million people have cast early or absentee votes so far, an increase of more than 1.2 million from all of the early votes cast there in 2016. The narrative is echoed in swing states Michigan and Wisconsin, where this year’s early voting totals have already nearly doubled the total of early votes cast in all of 2016. President Donald Trump’s narrow victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin allowed him to win the White House in 2016.

National: Officials stress security of election systems after U.S. reveals new Iranian and Russian efforts | Amy Gardner, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Elise Viebeck/The Washington Post

State and local officials hastened to reassure Americans this week that the nation’s election systems are secure after the country’s top intelligence official accused Iran of sending threatening emails to voters in several states and the United States said Russia obtained voter information from at least one county. U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts said the activity did not appear to include penetration of voting systems or access to voter registration databases, or the hacking of equipment that could be tampered with to alter election results. Arizona’s voter registration database remains secure,” said C. Murphy Hebert, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office in Arizona, one of the states where Democratic voters reported receiving the threatening emails. “Some information in the voter record is publicly available in Arizona through a public record request, including party registration and, up until recently, emails. We are vigilantly monitoring all election systems. ”Federal and state officials said they have fortified election systems since 2016, when Russian hackers scanned election-related websites and software nationwide for vulnerabilities.

National: Russian Hackers Break Into 2 County Systems, Stoking Election Security Fears | Philip Ewing and Miles Parks/NPR

Active Russian cyberattacks are targeting a wide swath of American government networks, including those involved with the ongoing election, federal authorities revealed Thursday. The focus of the effort include “U.S. state, local, territorial, and tribal government networks, as well as aviation networks,” according to a new bulletin from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.It continued: “As this recent malicious activity has been directed at … government networks, there may be some risk to elections information … However, the FBI and CISA have no evidence to date that integrity of elections data has been compromised. “U.S. officials said separately on Thursday afternoon that systems in two local government jurisdictions had been accessed, granting attackers admission to some limited data about voters.The announcement followed one day after an in-person briefing by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray in which they warned about Russian interference as well as an Iranian scheme to intimidate voters with spoof emails.

National: ‘There is a voter-suppression wing’: An ugly American tradition clouds the 2020 presidential race | James Rainey/Los Angeles Times

A Memphis, Tenn., poll worker turned away people wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts, saying they couldn’t vote. Robocalls warned thousands of Michigan residents that mail-in voting could put their personal information in the hands of debt collectors and police. In Georgia, officials cut polling places by nearly 10%, even as the number of voters surged by nearly 2 million. The long American tradition of threatening voting access — often for Black people and Latinos — has dramatically resurfaced in 2020, this time buttressed by a record-setting wave of litigation and an embattled president whose reelection campaign is built around a strategy of sowing doubt and confusion. Voting rights activists depict the fights against expanding voter access as a last-ditch effort by President Trump and his allies to disenfranchise citizens who tend to favor Democrats. The administration insists — despite no evidence of a widespread problem — that it must enforce restrictions to prevent voter fraud.“We have an incredibly polarized country and we have a political party whose leader thinks it’s to the party’s advantage to make it harder for people to register to vote and to vote,” said Richard L. Hasen, a UC Irvine law professor and authority on voting. “So that is where we are.”

National: When will your ballot be counted in the 2020 election? A look at what goes into the tallying process | Meredith Deliso/ABC

The last day to vote in the 2020 general election is Nov. 3. But ballots may not be counted for several days, if not weeks, after that date, experts said.Due to an anticipated record amount of mail-in voting this election season, combined with ballot counts that won’t start until Election Day in most states, election officials across the country could be overwhelmed in some cases. Deadlines for receiving mail-in ballots also extend past Nov. 3 in several states, all but making it a given that votes will be recorded in the days or even weeks after the election. The issue of mail-in ballot receipt deadlines is also fraught with legal challenges — some of which are still playing out in court with less than two weeks to go until the general election. And President Donald Trump has repeatedly attempted to sow doubt on mail-in voting through false and conspiratorial claims about voter fraud.

National: Native voters struggle amid growing reliance on mail-in voting | Teresa Tomassoni/The Washington Post

Nicole Horseherder lives two miles away from her closest neighbor on the Navajo reservation in Black Mesa, Ariz. She has no mailbox and no street address. The nearest post office requires a 30-mile bumpy ride along unpaved dirt roads.So when Horseherder’s mail-in ballot had not arrived by mid-October, she was worried.“I was seriously thinking I’m not going to receive my ballot,” said Horseherder, who is 50 and head of the Navajo environmental justice nonprofit Tó Nizhóní Ání.Though her ballot eventually did arrive, Horseherder said she is still concerned about her vote being received and counted by Election Day, given coronavirus restrictions have increased reliance on mail-in ballots and exacerbated nationwide U.S. Postal Service delays. Her sentiments are shared by many Indigenous peoples and Native American rights advocates who say those living in isolated areas of reservations with limited transportation were not considered when many states expanded mail-in voting this election season to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. “That shift to all vote-by-mail left Native Americans out of the conversation because vote-by-mail doesn’t work in Indian country,” said Jacqueline De León, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund and an enrolled member of the Isleta Pueblo, a Native American tribe in New Mexico.

National: Voting Disinformation Surges In Election’s Final Weeks | Pam Fessler/NPR

Dirty tricks and disinformation have been used to intimidate and mislead voters for as long as there have been elections. But they have been especially pervasive this year as millions of Americans cast ballots in a chaotic and contentious election.This has led to stepped-up efforts by election officials and voter advocates to counter the disinformation so voters are not discouraged from turning out. “2020 has been a year like no other because not only have we seen a higher volume of online mis- and disinformation, we have also changed a lot of processes about our society, including the way we administer elections,” said Jesse Littlewood, who leads the Stopping Cyber Suppression program for Common Cause. His nonpartisan group has already identified close to 5,000 incidents this year. Littlewood noted that the shift to more mail-in voting because of the pandemic has opened the way for a whole new wave of disinformation. One of the most high-profile cases involved robocalls that went to tens of thousands of minority voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and New York. The calls falsely claimed that voting by mail could be dangerous. “Mail-in voting sounds great,” a woman’s voice warned. “But did you know that if you vote by mail your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit companies to collect outstanding debts?”

National: Russia Created an Election Disinformation Playbook. Here’s How Americans Evolved It. | Isabelle Niu, Kassie Bracken and Alexandra Eaton/The New York Times