National: Trump took the nation in the wrong direction on cybersecurity, experts say | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

President Trump took the nation in the wrong direction on cybersecurity, according to a solid majority of experts polled by The Cybersecurity 202. During four years in office, Trump failed to hold adversaries including Russia accountable for hacking U.S. targets, removed experienced cyber-defenders from their posts for petty reasons and undermined much of the good work being done on cybersecurity within federal agencies, according to 71 percent of respondents to The Network, a panel of more than 100 cybersecurity experts who participate in our ongoing informal survey. The survey concluded before news broke about probably the most significant breach of the Trump administration — a hack linked to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, that infected at least five federal agencies — the Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security and State departments as well as the National Institutes of Health — and probably several others, as well as foreign governments and companies across the globe. Yet, the respondents’ comments reflect widespread concern Trump is disinterested in the damage that hack has done to national security, unwilling to take Russia to task and preoccupied instead with his own efforts to sow baseless doubts about his election loss. “Much of the work done … [during the Trump administration] was weakened by a president who didn’t prioritize cyber-issues and who, in many cases, actively undercut any actions or messaging against our adversaries,” said Chris Painter, the State Department cyber-coordinator under President Obama who also served for several months under Trump until his post was eliminated.

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Trump took the nation in the wrong direction on cybersecurity, experts say – The Washington Post

National: The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it. | Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima/The Washington Post

When Russian hackers first slipped their digital Trojan horses into federal government computer systems, probably sometime in the spring, they sat dormant for days, doing nothing but hiding. Then the malicious code sprang into action and began communicating with the outside world. At that moment — when the Russian malware began sending transmissions from federal servers to command-and-control computers operated by the hackers — an opportunity for detection arose, much as human spies behind enemy lines are particularly vulnerable when they radio home to report what they’ve found.Why then, when computer networks at the State Department and other federal agencies started signaling to Russian servers, did nobody in the U.S. government notice that something odd was afoot? Why then, when computer networks at the State Department and other federal agencies started signaling to Russian servers, did nobody in the U.S. government notice that something odd was afoot? The answer is part Russian skill, part federal government blind spot. The Russians, whose operation was discovered this month by a cybersecurity firm that they hacked, were good. After initiating the hacks by corrupting patches of widely used network monitoring software, the hackers hid well, wiped away their tracks and communicated through IP addresses in the United States rather than ones in, say, Moscow to minimize suspicions. The hackers also shrewdly used novel bits of malicious code that apparently evaded the U.S. government’s multibillion-dollar detection system, Einstein, which focuses on finding new uses of known malware and also detecting connections to parts of the Internet used in previous hacks. But Einstein, operated by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was not equipped to find novel malware or Internet connections, despite a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office suggesting that building such capability might be a wise investment. Some private cybersecurity firms do this type of “hunting” for suspicious communications — maybe an IP address to which a server has never before connected — but Einstein doesn’t.

Full Article: The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it. – The Washington Post

Michigan: Dominion’s C.E.O. defends his firm’s voting machines to Michigan lawmakers, denouncing a ‘reckless disinformation campaign.’ | Kathleen Gray/The New York Times

A day after Michigan’s 16 electoral votes formally went to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., a voting machine manufacturer told state senators that he stood by his company’s work, and shot down unfounded allegations that the results may have been manipulated. Dominion Voting Systems is the victim of “a dangerous and reckless disinformation campaign aimed at sowing doubt and confusion over the 2020 presidential election,” John Poulos, the company’s chief executive, told the State Senate Oversight Committee. The company has come under fire from supporters and lawyers for President Trump, who have claimed without evidence that the company’s voting machines switched votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. Mr. Poulos assured the committee that his company had no connections to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, or George Soros, the billionaire financier who is a subject of conspiracy theories on the right. “The comments about our company being started in Venezuela with Cuban money with the intent to steal elections are beyond bizarre and are complete lies,” Mr. Poulos added. “My company started in my basement, which happened to be in Toronto.”

Source: Dominion’s C.E.O. defends his firm’s voting machines to Michigan lawmakers, denouncing a ‘reckless disinformation campaign.’ – The New York Times

Electoral College Vote Officially Affirms Biden’s Victory | Nick Corasaniti and Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

It began at 10 a.m. in New Hampshire, where electors met in a statehouse chamber festooned with holiday decorations and gave their four votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. By noon on Monday, the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, ground zero for many of President Trump’s fruitless lawsuits, had backed Mr. Biden too. In New York, Bill and Hillary Clinton voted for Mr. Biden along with 27 other electors. And when California cast its 55 votes for Mr. Biden around 5:30 p.m. Eastern time, it pushed him past the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency, putting the official seal on his victory after weeks of efforts by Mr. Trump to use legal challenges and political pressure to overturn the results. With the Electoral College vote behind him, Mr. Biden called for unity while forcefully denouncing the president and his allies for their assault on the nation’s voting system. In an address in Wilmington, Del., on Monday night, he said the Republican efforts to get the Supreme Court to undo the result represented a “position so extreme we’ve never seen it before,” and called the attacks on election officials at the local level “unconscionable.” Mr. Biden said that “it is time to turn the page” on the election. Praising officials who stood up for the integrity of the system, he added: “It was honest, it was free and it was fair. They saw it with their own eyes. And they wouldn’t be bullied into saying anything different.” For all of the turmoil that Mr. Trump had stirred with his conspiracy theories, lawsuits and baseless claims of fraud, the Electoral College vote that sealed Mr. Biden’s victory was mostly a staid, formal affair, devoid of drama. As it always is.

Full Article: Electoral College Vote Officially Affirms Biden’s Victory – The New York Times

National: Electoral College makes it official: Biden won, Trump lost | Mark Sherman/Associated Press

The Electoral College decisively confirmed Joe Biden on Monday as the nation’s next president, ratifying his November victory in an authoritative state-by-state repudiation of President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede he had lost. The presidential electors gave Biden a solid majority of 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin that Trump bragged was a landslide when he won the White House four years ago. Heightened security was in place in some states as electors met to cast paper ballots, with masks, social distancing and other pandemic precautions the order of the day. The results will be sent to Washington and tallied in a Jan. 6 joint session of Congress over which Vice President Mike Pence will preside. For all Trump’s unsupported claims of fraud, there was little suspense and no change as every one of the electoral votes allocated to Biden and the president in last month’s popular vote went officially to each man. On Election Day, the Democrat topped the incumbent Republican by more than 7 million in the popular vote nationwide. California’s 55 electoral votes put Biden over the top. Vermont, with 3 votes, was the first state to report. Hawaii, with 4 votes, was the last.

Full Article: Electoral College makes it official: Biden won, Trump lost

National: Electoral college affirms Biden’s victory on a relatively calm day of a chaotic election | Elise Viebeck, Dan Simmons, Amy Worden and Omar Sofradzija/The Washington Post

President-elect Joe Biden achieved formal victory over President Trump on Monday, winning his 306 votes in the electoral college and advancing one more step toward inauguration even as die-hard Trump supporters redoubled their efforts to stop the normal transfer of power. Electors gathered in every state and the District of Columbia for a day-long series of votes that delivered no surprises for either Trump or Biden. The proceedings harked back to more typical presidential elections and stood in contrast with the unprecedented — though fruitless — six weeks of legal and procedural chaos triggered by Trump’s refusal to accept his loss. There were signs Monday that some of the president’s most ardent supporters would not abandon his cause, as groups of Republicans in six key battleground states held their own unofficial electoral-college-style votes for Trump. Though major protests did not materialize, threats of harassment and violence cast a shadow over elector meetings in several states.

Full Article: Electoral college affirms Biden’s victory on a relatively calm day of a chaotic election – The Washington Post

National: Election tech company Smartmatic demands retractions from Fox, Newsmax, OAN over conspiracy theories | Kevin Breuninger/CNBC

Smartmatic, the election technology company that has become embroiled in unfounded conspiracy theories about rigged voting in the 2020 presidential race, on Monday said it is issuing legal notices to three conservative media outlets demanding retractions “for publishing false and defamatory statements.” The Florida-based company has been targeted by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who is leading the Trump campaign’s long-shot attempts to undo Joe Biden’s projected presidential victory. Smartmatic in a press release said its letters to Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network make clear that the company “is reserving all its legal rights and remedies, including its right to pursue defamation and disparagement claims.” The legal notice to Fox, shared with CNBC, accuses the news outlet of engaging “in a concerted disinformation campaign against Smartmatic.” That 20-page letter cites dozens of claims, most of which were made on Fox’s air by Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell, who was formerly affiliated with the campaign and has filed multiple unsuccessful lawsuits alleging fraud in key swing states won by Biden. The majority of those statements were delivered in mid-November on programs hosted by Maria Bartiromo or Lou Dobbs, both of whom are also accused of making their own defamatory claims about Smartmatic. Additionally, the letter includes references to statements made on a Fox program hosted by Jeanine Pirro, along with one statement made by Fox host Jesse Watters.

Source: Smartmatic demands retractions from Fox, Newsmax, OAN

National: There is not and has not been any credible evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

One of the most striking parts of Tim Alberta’s interviews of 20 Americans who did — and didn’t — vote in this year’s presidential election is how often they based their assumptions on untrue claims. “It seems a Republican for president always has to win by a large enough margin to overcome the widespread election fraud that Democrats seem so comfortable with and prone toward. He failed to do that,” an Illinois Trump voter said to Alberta in an email. “I thought it remarkable that what I regard as credible-sounding fraud allegations are getting so little attention.” Asked about the source of this claim, the voter pointed to articles from the right-wing website American Spectator. We have evaluated this claim over and over since the election, but it persists within the public imagination quite stubbornly. Given that the results of the election have moved past any serious point of contention with the votes of the presidential electors on Monday, it’s worth delineating as robustly as possible why the assertion that the contest was marred by fraud are meritless. It’s worth, in other words, trying to explain why skepticism of the result is often based on erroneous logic and bad information. At the outset, I’ll note that I fully recognize that this article will be treated with skepticism of its own simply because it originates at The Washington Post. There has been a lengthy effort to paint this publication as untrustworthy that predates President Trump’s time in office, just as there has been an effort to suggest that electoral results are subject to rampant fraud for much longer than the past four years. I just ask that any such skepticism be set aside for the moment, so that the evidence can be considered on its own merits.

Full Article: There is not and has not been any credible evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election – The Washington Post

National: Suspected Russian hackers spied on U.S. Treasury emails – sources | Christopher Bing/Reuters

Hackers believed to be working for Russia have been monitoring internal email traffic at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments, according to people familiar with the matter, adding they feared the hacks uncovered so far may be the tip of the iceberg. The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Saturday, said one of the people familiar with the matter. U.S. officials have not said much publicly beyond the Commerce Department confirming there was a breach at one of its agencies and that they asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI to investigate. National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot added that they “are taking all necessary steps to identify and remedy any possible issues related to this situation.” The U.S. government has not publicly identified who might be behind the hacking, but three of the people familiar with the investigation said Russia is currently believed to be responsible for the attack. Two of the people said that the breaches are connected to a broad campaign that also involved the recently disclosed hack on FireEye, a major U.S. cybersecurity company with government and commercial contracts.

Full Article: Suspected Russian hackers spied on U.S. Treasury emails – sources | Reuters

National: Hack at Treasury and Commerce spurs emergency order from CISA | Justin Katz/FCW

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency late Sunday night issued an emergency directive in response to a sophisticated cyberattack mandating all federal civilian agencies stop using SolarWinds’ Orion products “immediately.” “The compromise of SolarWinds’ Orion Network Management Products poses unacceptable risks to the security of federal networks,” said CISA acting Director Brandon Wales. The “directive is intended to mitigate potential compromises within federal civilian networks, and we urge all our partners — in the public and private sectors — to assess their exposure to this compromise and to secure their networks against any exploitation.” CISA also said that federal agencies using SolarWinds products should provide a completion report to the CISA by noon Monday. SolarWinds, which provides IT management and monitoring products, boasts a long list of government customers including the Defense Department, NASA and NSA as well as “425 of the U.S. Fortune 500″ companies,” according to company’s website, The order is just the fifth binding operational directive issued by CISA in its history. Hackers – likely backed by Russia, according to analysts and government sources – breached both the Commerce and Treasury Departments’ networks, Reuters first reported Sunday afternoon. The news hit several days after FireEye announced its own network was compromised and cyber exploits used to test client networks were stolen.

Full Article: Hack at Treasury and Commerce spurs emergency order from CISA — FCW

National: Top Judiciary Democrat’s bill would criminalize threats to election officials | John Kruzel/TheHill

A top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort Monday to beef up criminal penalties for threats against election officials, which have escalated dramatically as President Trump has pressed baseless voter fraud claims following his electoral loss. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.), who serves as vice chair of the influential panel, urged the Department of Justice (DOJ) in a letter to investigate serious threats against election officials and poll workers that have come amid an increasingly hostile campaign of post-election misinformation. She also introduced a bill that would build on existing election-related legal protections and broaden criminal punishment against perpetrators. “You have to think about the fact that most of our elections are run by volunteers from our communities, who are [typically] seniors,” she told The Hill in an interview. “These are our friends and neighbors who suddenly found themselves very much in a bullseye of national attention, through no fault of their own and without any basis.” Scanlon’s election security push comes as state electors gathered across the country on Monday to finalize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. That process normally occurs in relative obscurity and far away from the glare of partisan politics. But in the key battleground state of Michigan — which Biden won by more than 154,000 votes — security concerns forced legislative office buildings to close for electoral voting. State Rep. Kevin Hertel (D) tweeted on Sunday that the closure was occurring “because credible threats have been made as Michigan’s electors to the Electoral College will meet at the Capitol.”

Full Article: Top Judiciary Democrat’s bill would criminalize threats to election officials | TheHill

National: Trump backers hold their own vote as Electoral College formalizes Biden’s victory | Haisten Willis, Jeremy Duda, Kathleen Masterson and David A. Fahrenthold/The Washington Post

Republicans in six states won by President-elect Joe Biden held their own electoral college-style votes Monday for President Trump — hoping that future court decisions would throw out Biden’s votes and count the GOP ones instead. These votes have no legal meaning, according to election law experts. The law only recognizes votes from electors chosen according to state law — which, in every one of these states, is the Democratic electors. But many Republicans who had been chosen to cast electoral votes for Trump still gathered to cast them. They said they were employing a tactic used by Democrats in Hawaii in an election 60 years ago — casting votes that don’t count, in the hopes that a later court decision would give them force. This year, that seems very unlikely to work. Trump has already spent weeks trying to overturn Biden’s victory in the courts, and has failed: The president and his allies have been rejected by at least 86 judges, including at the U.S. Supreme Court. But — in another sign that Trump has pulled the GOP establishment into his baseless, unprecedented effort to subvert Biden’s victory — many Republicans met anyway, to cast votes by the electoral college’s legal deadline of Dec. 14. “We took this procedural vote to preserve any legal claims that may be presented going forward,” said Bernie Comfort, Trump’s Pennsylvania campaign chairman, in a statement put out by the Pennsylvania GOP. “This was in no way an effort to usurp or contest the will of Pennsylvania voters.” In Nevada, six Republicans met in the capital, Carson City, to cast their faux vote before an audience of 15. “There’s still legal action pending in all these states, so what we’re doing here is complying with the requirement to vote on this day, in the state capital in the event court cases are resolved favorably,” said Jim DeGraffenreid, who was set to be one of Trump’s electors before Biden won the state. “You could say this is our howdy-doody to the system,” said Shawn Meehan, another Republican who took part.

Full Article: Trump backers hold their own vote as Electoral College formalizes Biden’s victory – The Washington Post

‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy | Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

The Supreme Court repudiation of President Trump’s desperate bid for a second term not only shredded his effort to overturn the will of voters: It also was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election. The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast on Election Day. Many regular Republicans supported this effort, too — a sign that Mr. Trump has not just bent the party to his will, but pressed a mainstay of American politics for nearly two centuries into the service of overturning an election outcome and assaulting public faith in the electoral system. The G.O.P. sought to undo the vote by such spurious means that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court quickly rejected the argument. Even some Republican leaders delivered a withering assessment of the 126 G.O.P. House members and 18 attorneys general who chose to side with Mr. Trump over the democratic process, by backing a lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to throw out some 20 million votes in four key states that cemented the president’s loss. “The act itself by the 126 members of the United States House of Representatives, is an affront to the country,” said Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “It’s an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.” Full Article: ‘An Indelible Stain’: How the G.O.P. Tried to Topple a Pillar of Democracy – The New York Times

National: Electors meeting to formally choose Biden as next president | Mark Sherman/Associated Press

Presidential electors are meeting across the United States on Monday to formally choose Joe Biden as the nation’s next president. Monday is the day set by law for the meeting of the Electoral College. In reality, electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots. The results will be sent to Washington and tallied in a Jan. 6 joint session of Congress over which Vice President Mike Pence will preside. The electors’ votes have drawn more attention than usual this year because President Donald Trump has refused to concede the election and continued to make baseless allegations of fraud. Biden is planning to address the nation Monday night, after the electors have voted. Trump, meanwhile, is clinging to his false claims that he won the election, but also undermining Biden’s presidency even before it begins. “No, I worry about the country having an illegitimate president, that’s what I worry about. A president that lost and lost badly,” Trump said in a Fox News interview that was taped Saturday. Following weeks of Republican legal challenges that were easily dismissed by judges, Trump and Republican allies tried to persuade the Supreme Court last week to set aside 62 electoral votes for Biden in four states, which might have thrown the outcome into doubt.

Full Article: Electors meeting to formally choose Biden as next president

National: Supreme Court Rejects Texas Suit Challenging Biden’s Victory | Adam Liptak/The New York Times

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an audacious lawsuit by Texas that had asked the court to throw out the presidential election results in four battleground states captured by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. The court, in a brief unsigned order, said Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.” The move, coupled with a one-sentence order on Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans, signaled that the court has refused to be drawn into President Trump’s losing campaign to overturn the results of the election last month. There will continue to be scattered litigation brush fires around the nation from Mr. Trump’s allies, but as a practical matter the Supreme Court’s action puts an end to any prospect that Mr. Trump will win in court what he lost at the polls. Texas’ lawsuit, filed directly in the Supreme Court, challenged election procedures in four battleground states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It asked the court to bar those states from casting their electoral votes for Mr. Biden and to shift the selection of electors to the states’ legislatures. That would have required the justices to discard millions of votes. Mr. Trump has said he expected to prevail in the Supreme Court, which includes three justices he appointed. One of them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was rushed onto the court in October in part in the hope that she would vote in Mr. Trump’s favor in election disputes.

Full Article: Supreme Court Rejects Texas Suit Challenging Biden’s Victory – The New York Times

National: If You Didn’t Vote for Trump, Your Vote Is Fraudulent – What the GOP Really Means by ‘Voter Fraud’ | Adam Serwer/The Atlantic

Armed protesters gathered outside the home of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson Saturday night, demanding that she overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in her state. “We will not stand down, we will not stop, we will continue to rise up, we will continue to take this election back for the president that actually won it by a landslide,” one protester at the scene declared, NPR reported. Benson told the outlet that “their threats and their attacks are aimed at the heart of democracy itself, trying to erode the public’s confidence in the democratic process, trying to sow seeds of doubt among everyone that their votes counted, that their voices were heard, that the results of the election are accurate.” Armed protesters showing up at the homes of elected officials to force them to overturn the outcome of the presidential election, especially in a state where Trump-supporting militants were caught plotting to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is obviously disturbing. Protesting government officials, even for grievances you or I might find absurd, is a fundamental constitutional right. The presence of firearms among the protesters, however, as well as the decision to protest at her residence instead of her workplace, add elements of coercion. But what’s really surprising is not that some people who believe that the will of the people has been subverted, and that the election results are fraudulent, have resorted to armed protests and intimidation—it’s that so few have.

Full Article: What the GOP Really Means by ‘Voter Fraud’ – The Atlantic

National: Fears of violence grow amid threats to election officials, lawmakers | Celine Castronuovo/The Hill

Intimidation and threats to election officials and lawmakers are feeding fears about violence amid calls by President Trump’s supporters to stop the certification of election results. Reports about threats began circulating within weeks of the election, with Arizona officials announcing on Nov. 17 that they were looking into an apparent death threat against Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D). In Georgia, state lawmakers have come under threat. In an interview with The Hill this week, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, criticized President Trump for continuing to “feed the fire” of voter fraud disinformation and urged him to “act more responsibly.” Sterling the previous week made an emotional and widely broadcast appeal to Trump and other Republicans to condemn violent threats against election officials. “Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot,” he said during a press conference. Sterling told The Hill he was motivated to issue his plea after he received a call about a young IT contractor for Dominion Voting Systems who had been targeted with a tweet that included a picture of a noose and accused the contractor of “treason.”

Full Article: Fears of violence grow amid threats to election officials, lawmakers | TheHill

National: Judges across the political spectrum rejected Trump’s efforts to overturn the election | Rosalind S. Helderman and Elise Viebeck/The Washington Post

They are both elected and appointed, selected by Democrats and Republicans alike. Some have served for decades — while others took the bench only months ago. One is a former high school teacher, another the first Native American woman appointed to a federal judgeship. A third worked for years for a Republican governor who has been a vocal supporter of President Trump. Since the November election, they have all ruled in court against Trump or one of his allies seeking to challenge or overturn the presidential vote. In a remarkable show of near-unanimity across the nation’s judiciary, at least 86 judges — ranging from jurists serving at the lowest levels of state court systems to members of the United States Supreme Court — rejected at least one post-election lawsuit filed by Trump or his supporters, a Washington Post review of court filings found. The string of losses was punctuated Friday by the brief and blunt order of the Supreme Court, which dismissed an attempt by the state of Texas to thwart the electoral votes of four states that went for President-elect Joe Biden. Taken together, the judges’s decisions — some short and to the point and others sweeping defenses of American democracy — have comprehensively dismantled the arguments advanced by Trump in his effort to get the courts to subvert Biden’s victory.

e: Judges across the political spectrum rejected Trump?s efforts to overturn the election – The Washington Post

National: Trump Is Looking for Fraud in All the Wrong Places | Julian Sanchez/The Atlantic

After losing to Joe Biden in November, President Donald Trump has been amplifying conspiracy theories about electronic voting without knowing or caring just how much this year’s swing states have done to protect the integrity of their elections. False claims that voting machines were “rigged” to change or delete votes—accepted by a disturbingly large percentage of Trump supporters—are harmful for obvious reasons: They wrongly undermine confidence in the democratic process, and have spurred harassment and threats aimed at election officials and poll workers. But they also give the public a wildly distorted picture of election cybersecurity, ignoring states with real security problems to address while perversely sowing doubts about states that have followed all the best expert advice.After a federal judge condemned Georgia’s antique voting machines as unreliable, Republican officials there scrambled to roll out and test more than 30,000 new voting machines—at a cost of more than $100 million—before the state’s presidential primary earlier this year. To Peach State election administrators, Trump supporters’ baseless fraud allegations are infuriating. “They’re part of a fever dream,” fumed Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting-implementation manager, in a PBS interview. “They’re made up out of whole cloth.” … Tall tales of hacked voting machines and hijacked tabulation software gain an air of plausibility by citing the essential work done by serious cybersecurity experts in recent years to document vulnerabilities in widely deployed voting technology. Until angels learn to code, all software, whether installed on a laptop, smartphone, or voting machine, will have flaws and vulnerabilities an attacker might exploit. A robust approach to cybersecurity, therefore, requires more than just finding and closing those loopholes. It means designing systems that will work reliably even if compromised—a level of resiliency that discourages hackers from attacking them in the first place. For election systems, that means ensuring that a voter-verified physical ballot—an auditable paper trail—exists for every vote cast. Manual counts of a sample of those paper ballots, known as risk-limiting audits, can then be used to confirm that the digital tallies are accurate.

Full Article: Trump Is Looking for Fraud in All the Wrong Places – The Atlantic

National: Sidney Powell’s secret ‘military intelligence expert,’ key to fraud claims in election lawsuits, never worked in military intelligence | Emma Brown, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites/The Washington Post

The witness is code-named “Spyder.” Or sometimes “Spider.” His identity is so closely guarded that lawyer Sidney Powell has sought to keep it even from opposing counsel. And his account of vulnerability to international sabotage is a key part of Powell’s failing multistate effort to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Powell describes Spyder in court filings as a former “Military Intelligence expert,” and his testimony is offered to support one of her central claims. In a declaration filed in four states, Spyder alleges that publicly available data about server traffic shows that voting systems in the United States were “certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China.” Spyder, it turns out, is Joshua Merritt, a 43-year-old information technology consultant in the Dallas area. Merritt confirmed his role as Powell’s secret witness in phone interviews this week with The Washington Post. Records show that Merritt is an Army veteran and that he enrolled in a training program at the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, the unit he cites in his declaration. But he never completed the entry-level training course, according to Meredith Mingledorff, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, which includes the battalion. “He kept washing out of courses,” said Mingledorff, citing his education records. “He’s not an intelligence analyst.” In an interview, Merritt maintained that he graduated from the intelligence training program. But even by his own account, he was only a trainee with the 305th, at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and for just seven months more than 15 years ago.

Full Article: Sidney Powell’s secret ‘military intelligence expert,’ key to fraud claims in election lawsuits, never worked in military intelligence – The Washington Post

National: ‘A dark, empty place:’ Public officials face personal threats as tensions flare | Hannah Knowles, Annie Gowen and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

State and local officials of both parties have warned that President Trump’s increasingly desperate tweets about election fraud are fueling the potential for violence as well as another ominous trend of 2020, in which public servants and others who disagree are targeted at their offices and homes with armed protests, harassing phone calls and stalkers. Last week, an “enemies” list of state and federal officials who rejected Trump’s baseless election conspiracy theories floated up from the dark corners of the Web, with home addresses listed and red targets over their photos, the latest in a string of threats to public officials. The list falsely accused swing-state governors, voting systems executives and the former top U.S. cybersecurity official responsible for securing November’s presidential election of “changing votes and working against the President” in a treasonous attempt to “overthrow our democracy.” The names from the list shared on social media included the hashtags #remembertheirfaces and #NoQuarterForTraitors. Over the weekend, demonstrations by Trump supporters in D.C.; Olympia, Wash.; and elsewhere turned violent, with four people stabbed in the nation’s capital and one person shot in Olympia. These kinds of conflicts, coupled with increasingly personal attacks on public officials, are raising fears of worse to come. “If blood is spilled, it is on the hands of the president,” an attorney for Christopher Krebs said in a statement Wednesday. Krebs, the former top cybersecurity official, is suing the Trump campaign and one of its lawyers working to overturn the election results for defamation, after the president fired him and the lawyer suggested that Krebs should be executed. “Trump and U.S. senators have refused to condemn these death threats,” said Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state in Georgia, after the “enemies” list surfaced online.

Full Article: Public officials face personal threats from Trump supporters – The Washington Post

With Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton facing federal probe, lawsuit to help Trump comes amid whispers of pardons | Matthew Mosk,Katherine Faulders, andJohn Santucci/ABC

The Texas politician who filed the Supreme Court election challenge that President Donald Trump touted as “the big one” may have good reason to curry favor with the White House at this moment. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took the lead in the long-shot legal bid to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat just two weeks after reports surfaced that he is the subject of an FBI investigation into allegations he abused his office to benefit a wealthy donor — a thorny problem Trump could eliminate with a presidential pardon. Paxton and a group of Republican state attorneys general met with the president at the White House on Thursday, days after filing the case that now shoulders Trump’s hopes of holding onto his job for another term. Paxton’s attorney, Philip H. Hilder, declined to comment on the nature of Paxton’s discussions with the president. Democrats have gone public with speculation about Paxton’s possible motivation for filing the suit, which legal experts have assessed as a case unlikely to find favor with the Supreme Court, even with the court’s conservative majority. “This was an act of some bizarre-world desperation. I don’t know what drove it,” Marc Elias, the lead attorney for the Democrats fending off a barrage of election lawsuits from Trump and his allies, said in an appearance on CNN. “I don’t know if it’s politics, or I read that it may be because Paxton is fishing for a pardon,” Elias said. “I don’t know what’s behind it, but this is honestly a bizarre lawsuit.”

Full Article: With Texas AG facing federal probe, lawsuit to help Trump comes amid whispers of pardons – ABC News

National: In Blistering Retort, 4 Battleground States Tell Texas to Butt Out of Election | Adam Liptak and Jeremy W. Peters/The New York Times

In blistering language denouncing Republican efforts to subvert the election, the attorneys general for Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to reject a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the victories in those states by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., calling the audacious effort an affront to democracy and the rule of law. The lawsuit, filed by the Republican attorney general of Texas and backed by his G.O.P. colleagues in 17 other states and 106 Republican members of Congress, represents the most coordinated, politicized attempt to overturn the will of the voters in recent American history. President Trump has asked to intervene in the lawsuit as well in hopes that the Supreme Court will hand him a second term he decisively lost. The suit is the latest in a spectacularly unsuccessful legal effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results, with cases so lacking in evidence that judges at all levels have mocked or condemned them as without merit. Legal experts have derided this latest suit as well, which makes the audacious claim, at odds with ordinary principles of federalism, that the Supreme Court should investigate and override the election systems of four states at the behest of a fifth. The responses by the four states — represented by three Democratic attorneys general and, in Georgia, a Republican one — comprehensively critiqued Texas’s unusual request to have the Supreme Court act as a kind of trial court in examining supposed election irregularities with the goal of throwing out millions of votes. “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” a brief for Pennsylvania said.

Full Article: Four State A.G.s Ask Supreme Court to Reject Texas Election Lawsuit – The New York Times

National: Website targeting U.S. election officials draws attention of intelligence agencies | Andy Sullivan, Brad Heath, Mark Hosenball/Reuters

The harassment campaign against U.S. election officials following President Donald Trump’s defeat took an ominous turn on Thursday after a website surfaced that accused them of “treason” and included photographs and home addresses, drawing the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies. The site, along with several associated social media accounts, included photographs of Republican and Democratic officials, with rifle crosshairs superimposed on them. The FBI said on Thursday that it was aware of the issue. U.S. intelligence agencies are also looking into the website and its origins, a source said on Thursday. Several of the officials targeted said the messaging amounted to a call for violence against those who worked to oversee the Nov. 3 election, which Trump lost to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden. They urged Trump to denounce it. “If anyone needs to be reminded that public calls for violence beget violence, this is the clarion call. If blood is spilled, it is on the hands of the president, his campaign, his lawyers, and the silent Republicans standing in the president’s shadow,” said Jim Walden, a lawyer for Christopher Krebs, who oversaw cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security until he was fired by Trump after the election. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, likewise pointed the finger at the president. “Trump and U.S. senators have refused to condemn these death threats,” she told Reuters. “In fact, he continues to support those who are actively calling for elections officials to be shot.”

Full Article: Website targeting U.S. election officials draws attention of intelligence agencies | Reuters

National: States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn ‘cacophony of bogus claims’ | The Guardian

Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US supreme court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Donald Trump seeking to undo Joe Biden’s victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and makes “bogus” claims. “What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices.Texas filed the longshot suit against the four election battleground states on Tuesday directly with the supreme court. It asked that the voting results in those states be thrown out because of their changes in voting procedures that allowed expanded mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.On Thursday afternoon, more than 100 Republican members of the House filed an amicus brief with the court in support of the Texas lawsuit. Trump’s campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results. Legal experts have said the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states.

Full Article: States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn ‘cacophony of bogus claims’ | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

National: Two reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy. | Jeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Adam Liptak/The New York Times

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has asked the Supreme Court to do something it has never done before: disenfranchise millions of voters in four states and reverse the results of the presidential election. The case is highly problematic from a legal perspective and is riddled with procedural and substantive shortcomings, election law experts said. And for its argument to succeed — an outcome that is highly unlikely, according to legal scholars — a majority of the nine justices would have to overlook a debunked claim that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chances of victory were “less than one in a quadrillion.” Mr. Paxton is a compromised figure, under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations, by several former employees, of abusing his office to aid a political donor. Here are some reasons this case is probably not “the big one” like President Trump has called it. Texas appears to have no claim to pursue the case, which would extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can dictate how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere harm the rights of Texans. The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has a right to interfere with the process through which other states award their votes in the Electoral College, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and director of its election law program. The authority to manage elections falls to the states individually, not in any sort of collective sense that the Paxton suit implies.

Full Article: Two Reasons the Texas Election Case Is Faulty – The New York Times

National: The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud | Aaron Blake/The Washington Post

The GOP’s latest effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, like many such efforts before it, is a bit of a mess. The lawsuit, which was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and is now joined by the Trump campaign and 17 other Republican attorneys general, wrongly claims that no presidential candidate has lost both Florida and Ohio and won the presidency. (This would be news to John F. Kennedy.) It ridiculously suggests that late vote shifts in key states were astronomically improbable — to the tune of 1 in 1 quadrillion — a claim with which Philip Bump dispatches here. Its attempt to invalidate the vote in four states has already been rebuked by several top Republicans, and not exactly Mitt Romney Republicans. But the GOP’s new focus on this hail-Mary case is also notable for one key reason: It essentially throws in the towel on proving fraud. Ever since the election, President Trump’s legal team and allied lawyers have said they had myriad evidence of actual, provable fraud. This has been rejected in almost every case by the courts, but the Trump team has asserted that its evidence — based largely on affidavits from people involved in the vote-tabulating process — is sound and demonstrates malfeasance. The Texas lawsuit, though, effectively acknowledges that that effort has failed. Rather than claiming evidence of proven fraud, it instead claims that the fraud is actually “undetectable,” because election officials made it so by doing illegal things. And that’s why it wants the results overturned.

Full Article: The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud – The Washington Post

National: Legislatures across country plan sweeping election reform push | Reid Wilson/The Hill

State legislatures across the country are contemplating sweeping changes to the way elections are administered after a tumultuous presidential contest, one that ended with both the highest voter turnout in American history and the outgoing president baselessly calling its integrity into question. In its wake, election rules have become the hottest topic for state legislatures, especially in presidential battleground states. Lawmakers in a handful of states have begun introducing legislation in so-called pre-filing periods, windows that open before a session begins that enable lawmakers to propose bills. At least 60 election-related bills have been introduced in Texas, 26 are pending in New Hampshire and 41 in Montana, according to a count compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). “We can expect a busier than ever elections agenda for the states in 2021,” said Wendy Underhill, director of the NCSL’s elections and redistricting programs. In some states, legislators plan to make permanent access to absentee and mail-in voting that were temporarily expanded by the coronavirus pandemic, while others are looking to enact new restrictions on how people can vote.

Full Article: Legislatures across country plan sweeping election reform push | TheHill

National: Security advocates see a possible silver lining in Trump’s election assaults | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Attacks on the voting company Dominion and the integrity of the election by President Trump and his allies are posing a conundrum for election security advocates. On one hand, they’ve long battled with Dominion and other top voting machine vendors to take security more seriously and be more transparent about their operations so they can be vetted by outside security experts. “If there’s one positive piece that comes out of this it would be greater oversight of election vendors,” David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told me. Dominion, along with two other major vendors, control about 80 percent of the U.S. market for election systems. “If there’s a successful cyberattack against one of them, that could have devastating consequences,” he said.On the other hand, the attacks by Trump and his supporters are basically made up out of whole cloth and contrary to all available evidence. Security pros worry these conspiracy theories that go far beyond any legitimate concerns will corrode public faith in elections and convince people it’s not worth turning out to vote. “Unfortunately, there’s a danger that the entire effort to increase cybersecurity in elections will get tarred by the unfounded rantings of a few people,” Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There are legitimate things that need to be done to improve the security of our election systems and they should be done regardless of what some crazy people are alleging.”

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Security advocates see a possible silver lining in Trump’s election assaults – The Washington Post

Matt Masterson, CISA’s top election security official, to step down | Sean Lyngaas/CyberScoop

Matt Masterson, one of the U.S. government’s top election experts, is leaving his post as of next week for a role in academia where he will continue to study the disinformation campaigns that have plagued the country, he told CyberScoop on Thursday. Masterson has been a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency since 2018. He led a team that reassured the public that the 2020 election was secure, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless assertions to the contrary. Masterson will join the Stanford Internet Observatory, a team of academics and tech experts led by former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, which works on election security and social media challenges. Masterson said his last day at CISA will be Dec. 18. At Stanford, “We’re going to unpack what we’ve learned over the last few years [on election security],” Masterson said in an interview, including “what more needs to be done on a broader level.” Masterson said he wants to continue to tackle disinformation campaigns, which could extend to the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine. Experts fear that a large swath of Americans are distrustful of the efficacy of the vaccine, in part because of conspiracy theories that spread online. Masterson, a former election official in Ohio, was part of a team of CISA officials who rebuilt trust between election officials across the country and federal personnel after the 2016 election.

Full Article: Matt Masterson, CISA’s top election security official, to step down