National

Many Americans are worried that their votes won’t be counted in this election. We’ve seen court battles over how late states will accept absentee ballots, how many drop boxes they’ll provide, what signatures they’ll require and other issues. Nearly every day another 11th-hour decision comes down, including from the Supreme Court. Voting-rights plaintiffs have had mixed results in the courts, and their losses have raised concerns about voter suppression. What’s missing in this focus on court rulings is the bigger picture of how dramatically the voting system has changed for 2020. These changes, mostly made by state governments rather than the courts, have enabled widespread access to political participation, even amid the exceptional stresses of the pandemic. Despite all the election-related anxieties of spring and summer, we are likely to see the highest turnout in more than a century—65% of eligible voters, meaning 150 million votes—according to the latest forecast from the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. A week before Election Day, early voting had already surpassed its 2016 level. The reason is that highly mobilized voters have been able to take advantage of several major policy changes. Once the pandemic hit, the most important issue was whether voters would have the option of easily voting by mail. In particular, would states that normally permit absentee voting only for a narrow set of reasons, such as being away, relax those restrictions? Several months ago, it appeared this might be a vigorously contested question, but it hasn’t turned out that way in most state legislatures.

Full Article: Early and Mail-In Voting for 2020 Election Expands Dramatically Despite Legal Fights – WSJ

Ahead of Election, Police Prepare for Violence and Disruption | Neil MacFarquhar and Shaila Dewan/The New York Times

The Las Vegas Police had a quandary. They were on high alert for election-related threats, but when long lines of voters began snaking down streets and around parking lots two weeks ago, they feared that stationing patrol cars outside polling stations might drive people away. “How do you make people feel safe in that environment without creating an overt police presence — that is a challenge for all police departments,” said Andrew Walsh, deputy chief in the Homeland Security division of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. They decided that frequent but random patrols to look for potential trouble was the better choice. Striking that balance is at the root of many of the challenges facing law enforcement agencies nationwide as they prepare for an election rife with uncertainties. The largest departments have run practice drills on scenarios including violent clashes between Biden and Trump supporters, the sudden appearance of an armed paramilitary group, a cyberattack or a bomb. “This is such a polarized environment and a lot of people are angry,” said John D. Cohen, a former Homeland Security counterterrorism coordinator with 34 years experience in law enforcement. “I have never seen a threat environment as dynamic, complex and dangerous as the one we are in right now.” Police in Las Vegas — like their counterparts in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and in other cities all across the country — are grappling with deploying significantly more officers to counteract any disturbances without scaring voters away.

Full Article: Ahead of Election, Police Prepare for Violence and Disruption – The New York Times

National: The year of the vote: How Americans surmounted a pandemic and dizzying rule changes so their voices would be heard | Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

Ben Lucas thought about displaying a Biden-Harris campaign sign in his front yard in Eugene, Ore., but he preferred to encourage all Americans, not just Democrats, to participate in this year’s election.So last weekend, the 24-year-old graduate student found an old piece of plywood in the garage, painted the letters “V-O-T-E” on it and propped it against a tree. He explained: “I wanted to be seen, and I wanted to be heard.” Millions of Americans have also wanted to be heard. In a year when the act of voting felt more precarious than ever, more than 94 million had voted in the 2020 election by Monday, casting their ballots early or by mail in record numbers in virtually every state in the nation. Tens of millions more will don masks, and in many places warm clothes, to vote the old-fashioned way — in person, on Election Day. They’ll do it despite — and in many cases, because of — the isolation and obstacles of this unusual year. Those who have voted have lost jobs or loved ones to the pandemic or have battled the coronavirus themselves. They have withstood rain and heat and lines that lasted from morning until dark to register their electoral choices, risked exposure to the virus and navigated dizzying rule changes about signature requirements and drop boxes and ballot envelopes. They have been inundated with unsubstantiated attacks by President Trump on the integrity of the election.

Full Article: The year of the vote: How Americans surmounted a pandemic and dizzying rule changes so their voices would be heard – The Washington Post

National: Why Are Lines at Polling Places So Long? Math – It’s a resource allocation problem, a tough challenge in “queueing theory.” It’s also racism. | Adam Rogers/WIRED

Mark Pelczarski was ready to retire. This was 2011; he was teaching computer science in Chicago by then, but that was really just the capstone on a legendary career in software. In 1979, Pelczarski wrote Magic Paintbrush, an artmaking program for the Apple II, the first personal computer capable of color. He started Penguin Software two years later to publish classics like Graphics Magician, and in the late 1980s he went on to develop music software, create a CD-ROM precursor to Google Maps, and play steel drums with Jimmy Buffett. It’s safe to say that computers look and sound the way they do, at least a little bit, because of Mark Pelczarski’s code. But just when he was about to call it quits, the head of tech for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign called him, asking if any of Pelczarski’s students might have internship potential for their tech team. Pelczarski asked what kind of skills the Obamaites were looking for. “It was a little bit beyond what my students could do, but I was in my last semester at that point,” Pelczarski says. “I said, ‘I might be able to help you a little bit.’”

Full Article: Why Are Lines at Polling Places So Long? Math | WIRED

National: We Have Never Had Final Results on Election Day | Maggie Astor/The New York Times

For weeks, President Trump and his allies have been laying groundwork to challenge the results of the election if he loses. Now, in the final days of the campaign, he has settled on a blatantly ahistorical closing argument: that the votes in a fair election should not be counted past election night. “The Election should end on November 3rd., not weeks later!” he tweeted on Friday, two days after telling reporters in Nevada, “Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after Nov. 3 to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts.” “You would think you want to have the votes counted, tabulated, finished by the evening of Nov. 3,” he said at a campaign event a week earlier. In reality, the scenario Mr. Trump is outlining — every vote in a modern election being “counted, tabulated, finished” by midnight — is not possible and never has been. No state ever reports final results on election night, and no state is legally expected to.Americans are accustomed to knowing who won on election night because news organizations project winners based on partial counts, not because the counting is actually completed that quickly. These race calls mean Candidate A is far enough ahead that, given the number of outstanding ballots and the regions those ballots are coming from, Candidate B would realistically be unable to close the gap.

Full Article: We Have Never Had Final Results on Election Day – The New York Times

National: Preventing a Military Decision About Who Won a Disputed Election | Dakota S. Rudesill/Just Security

President Donald Trump recently speculated at a campaign rally that he might issue an executive order to prevent his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, from becoming president. As he often does, Trump entertained his crowd that night by weaving together sincere and ridiculous statements, truth and falsehoods. It is hard to know whether the president would actually try to use an administrative directive as part of an effort to stay in office. Unfortunately, the norm-shattering step of a self-serving “I won” executive order from President Trump is conceivable, as is a legal opinion to that same effect from a Justice Department run by an Attorney General who has prioritized protection of the president over the non-partisan, fair, and impartial administration of justice. Trump and his team have demonstrated their willingness to abuse the presidency for personal and political benefit. Trump has repeatedly indicated intent to contest the election if he is not declared the winner. And, serious gaps and ambiguities in election law could leave a disputed election unresolved through inauguration day. In this context, it is prudent to anticipate that Trump and his political appointees might take norm-shredding, legally dubious administrative steps to hold onto power. Incalculable damage could be done to our nation by a raging election dispute coupled with the incumbent administration ordering the executive branch and particularly the military to recognize Trump as the winner. The harm would be especially severe to fundamental norms of civil-military relations, with terrible implications for our country’s global standing. Despite more than two centuries of American tradition and multiple statements by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Gen. Mark Milley, about the U.S. military staying out of elections, the armed forces could face an impossible decision about whom to recognize as president and give the nuclear codes (and someone has to have them).

Full Article: Preventing a Military Decision About Who Won a Disputed Election

National: The voting technology problems that could trigger panic at the polls | Eric Geller/Politico

While mail-in voting has raised fears and sparked court battles during this election, problems with technology ranging from voting machines to results websites could just as easily disrupt voting or sow doubts about the outcome. Newly competitive battleground state Georgia is using controversial touch screen voting machines for the first time in a presidential election. In the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, where new voting machines malfunctioned last year, several counties have now also configured those machines to speed up ballot-counting in a way that doesn’t give voters a chance to hold the ballots in their hands. And voting machines could turn out to be the least of the technological problems. Across the country, the servers that store voter data and post unofficial results are vulnerable to temporary outages — snafus that could worsen long lines on Election Day, block or discourage voters from casting ballots or fuel claims of election fraud. “Any kind of disinformation about election-related technology, even if there is no hack, is cause for concern, because to be effective, all that is required is for the public to perceive a problem — whether real or not,” said Eddie Perez, director of technology development and open standards at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, an election technology advocacy organization.

Full Article: The voting technology problems that could trigger panic at the polls – POLITICO

National: Computer experts sound warnings on safety of America’s voting machines | Pat Beall USA Today

Millions of voters going to the polls Tuesday will cast their ballots on machines blasted as unreliable and inaccurate for two decades by computer scientists from Princeton University to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Toyed with by white hat hackers and targeted for scathing reviews from secretaries of state in California and Ohio, Direct Recording Electronic voting systems, or DREs, have startled Illinois voters by flashing the word Republican at the top of a ballot and forgotten what day it was in South Carolina. They were questioned in the disappearance of 12,000 votes in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, in 2002 and 18,000 votes in Sarasota County, Florida, in 2006.“Antiquated, seriously flawed and vulnerable to failure, breach, contamination and attack,” U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg wrote of Georgia’s aging DRE system before ordering the state to replace it in 2019. “No one is using a computer they purchased in the 1990s,” said Warren Stewart, senior editor and data specialist for Verified Voting, a nonprofit advocacy group tracking election systems. But voters in more than 300 counties and 12,000 precincts will be casting ballots using DRE technology already aging in the 1990s, when flash drives were bleeding edge tech and Netscape Navigator was the next new thing.

Full Articlee: Computer experts sound warnings on safety of America’s voting machines

National: Despite Risks, Some States Still Use Paperless Voting Machines | Lucas Ropek/Government Technology

For years, paperless voting machines have been characterized as an election security hazard. Without an auditable paper trail, security experts say vote tabulation runs the risk of producing results inconsistent with the voters’ choices, either because of hacking or technical errors. While most states have seen adoption of hybrid digital-paper solutions that include a voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT), not all of them have.Today, counties in Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, and New Jersey are still exclusively using paperless machines, also called direct recording electronic systems (DREs).Derek Tisler, election security analyst with the Brennan Center, said the number of states using DREs has nearly halved since the last election, but there are a smattering of states that, for reasons mostly financial, still have not switched.”In 2016, there were 14 states that used paperless machines as the primary polling place equipment in at least some of their counties and towns. They represented about 1 in 5 votes that were cast in the 2016 election,” said Tisler. “Since then, six of those states have fully transitioned to some sort of paper-based voting equipment.”

Full Article: Despite Risks, Some States Still Use Paperless Voting Machines

National: Long lines, broken machines: Why voters should not be too worried about some poll site snafus | Ivan Pereira and Catherine Sanz/ABC

With voting in the 2020 election well underway across the country, Americans are anxious to make sure their choices are counted with as few problems as possible. Despite the mail-in and early voting processes appearing to go smoothly for the vast majority of people, there have been reports circulating on social media (as there have been in other election cycles) that have raised concerns. Videos of long lines of people, even in the thousands, outside voting sites and reports of glitches with voting machines have gone viral over the last couple of weeks. Despite these stories, election integrity experts told ABC News that voters should not necessarily panic or believe those instances are examples of voter fraud or intimidation. Most of those issues can be quickly addressed and resolved, according to Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections for the non-partisan watchdog group Common Cause. “First and foremost, elections aren’t perfect,” she told ABC News. “Just like anything else, stuff happens and there are a lot of ways people can deal with that.”

Full Article: Long lines, broken machines: Why voters should not be too worried about some poll site snafus – ABC News

National: DHS plans largest-ever operation to secure U.S. election against hacking | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division is mounting the largest operation to secure a U.S. election, aiming to prevent a repeat of Russia’s 2016 interference and to ward off new threats posed by Iran and China. On Election Day, DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will launch a 24/7 virtual war room, to which election officials across the nation can dial in at any time to share notes about suspicious activity and work together to respond. The agency will also pass along classified information from intelligence agencies about efforts they detect from adversaries seeking to undermine the election and advise states on how to protect against such attacks. “I anticipate possibly thousands of local election officials coming in to share information in real time, to coordinate, to track down what’s real and what’s not, separate fact from fiction on the ground,” said Matt Masterson, CISA’s senior cybersecurity adviser, who has helped lead election preparations. “We’ll be able to sort through what’s happening and identify: Is this a typical election event or is this something larger?” The operation will run for days or weeks until winners are clear in most races — and potentially until the election is formally certified in December. “We’ll remain stood up until the [election] community tells us, ‘Okay, we’re good, you can stand down,’ ” Masterson said. The wide-ranging operation is the culmination of four years during which CISA has grown from a backwater agency that was largely unknown outside Washington to the main federal government liaison to a nationwide ecosystem of officials running the elections.

Full Article: DHS plans largest-ever operation to secure U.S. election against hacking – The Washington Post

National: Ransomware Can Interfere with Elections and Fuel Disinformation – Basic Cybersecurity Precautions Are Key to Minimizing the Damage | Richard Forno/Government Technology

Government computer systems in Hall County, Georgia, including a voter signature database, were hit by a ransomware attack earlier this fall in the first known ransomware attack on election infrastructure during the 2020 presidential election. Thankfully, county officials reported that the voting process for its citizens was not disrupted. The attack follows on the heels of a ransomware attack last month on eResearchTechnology, a company that provides software used in clinical trials, including trials for COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines. Less than a week after the attack in Georgia was revealed, the FBI warned that cyber criminals have unleashed a wave of ransomware attacks targeting hospital information systems. Attacks like these underscore the challenges that cybersecurity experts face daily – and which loom over the upcoming election. As a cybersecurity professional and researcher, I can attest that there is no silver bullet for defeating cyber threats like ransomware. Rather, defending against them comes down to the actions of thousands of IT staff and millions of computer users in organizations large and small across the country by embracing and applying the basic good computing practices and IT procedures that have been promoted for years.

Full Article: Ransomware Can Interfere with Elections and Fuel Disinformation – Basic Cybersecurity Precautions Are Key to Minimizing the Damage

National: How State and Local Officials Plan to Prevent Election Violence | Alan Greenblatt/Governing

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot wants to be prepared for any imaginable scenario. Running an election with record turnout during a pandemic was always going to be a challenge, but she also has to take seriously the possibility of violence and voter intimidation. She hopes the election and its aftermath will be peaceful, but she knows she can’t count on it. “Given what we’ve experienced over the course of the spring and the summer, we can’t presume that what will happen on election night or the days before, and certainly not the days after are going to be peaceful,” she said. Toward that end, Lightfoot ran an “all hazards drill,” with emergency management, law enforcement and election officials trying to game out every possible thing that could go wrong – unrest, violence, storms, COVID-19 outbreaks, arson. “We really threw in the kitchen sink,” she said. “If you were pitching this to a Hollywood producer, they’d say, no way this could happen.” That same level of concern and preparedness is evident all over the country. State and local officials are having to assume things might turn grim. They’re working collaboratively to be sure any incidents can be addressed quickly. “There’s a long history of intimidation and violence associated with elections,” said Christopher Witko, a political scientist at Penn State University. The Republican Party was barred nationally for nearly four decades from recruiting election observers to challenge voters’ credentials aggressively. The federal consent decree limiting the party’s activities expired in 2018, making this the first national election to be conducted without such restrictions.

Full Article: How State and Local Officials Plan to Prevent Election Violence

National: Overstating the foreign threat to elections poses its own risks, U.S. officials and experts say | Ellen Nakashima/The Washington Post

Iranian government-backed hackers last week pulled off a feat few were expecting. They became the first foreign adversary to interfere in the 2020 election by sending threatening emails to voters. But that action — so far the only confirmed intelligence operation by a foreign government that directly targeted specific voters in this election — had far less impact than Moscow’s hacking and leaking of Democratic emails four years ago. Officials and disinformation experts warn that overstating the threat posed by foreign spies and hackers plays into their narrative that they have the power to sow chaos, and undermines the ability to fashion the most effective and proportionate response. “My biggest concern is that we give a foreign adversary more credit than they’re actually due,” said Brig. Gen. Joe Hartman, the election security lead for the military’s U.S. Cyber Command, which is working with the National Security Agency to protect the election from foreign threats.

Full Article: Overstating the foreign threat to elections poses its own risks, U.S. officials and experts say – The Washington Post

National: U.S. voter info has always been public — but now it’s getting weaponized | Kevin Collier/NBC

When John Ratcliffe, the top U.S. intelligence official, said at a news conference last week that Iran and Russia had obtained American voter registration information, he left out an important point: American voters’ data is already public and widely available. “We have confirmed some voter registration information has been obtained by Iran and separately by Russia,” Ratcliffe said last Wednesday. “This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion.” Iran had already weaponized some of that information in the form of threatening emails sent to some Democrats in Florida. The email campaign showed no signs of any successful effort to target Florida’s election infrastructure. But the campaign offered a stark reminder that voting in the U.S. comes with a strong chance that your personal information is shared online. While states’ readiness to share the information may not be common knowledge, it has been the reality for more than a century, said Eitan Hersh, a politics professor at Tufts University and author of a history of how political campaigns target voters.”I think there’s a pretty widespread view across the political spectrum that if you want to participate in the political process, having a public record about it is part of what that means,” he said. “It’s amazingly hard to not have your name, address and birthday in the public record.” State legislators periodically introduce bills to change state laws about sharing the information, but “the mainstream of both parties are committed to the idea that parties should be able to contact you, so these bills are squashed,” Hersh said.

Full Article: U.S. voter info has always been public — but now it’s getting weaponized

National: With Election Day looming, an anxious nation hears rumblings of violence | Marc Fisher/The Washington Post

This weekend, several dozen people will arrive at secret locations in West Virginia and Colorado to ride out the election and its aftermath. If Tuesday’s vote sparks unrest, Drew Miller’s customers at Fortitude Ranch will be secure behind walls patrolled by armed guards. “Could the election devolve into civil war? Unlikely,” mused Miller, the founder of a budding network of members-only survivalist camps. “But look at World War I: Some worthless, low-level archduke gets assassinated and things escalate out of control. I’ve got people who are concerned that all it would take is a close election and some cheating.” In Portland, Ore., where a right-wing armed group plans to show up at ballot drop-off sites on Tuesday with weapons in plain view, some extreme left-wing organizers are preparing be there as well. “The right is not going to give up their power unless they feel threatened,” said Olivia Katbi Smith, a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America in Portland. “People are opening up to the idea that a riot is the language of the unheard. Property destruction is not violence.” On the eve of a presidential election fraught with tension, warning flares are bursting across American skies. From federal and local law enforcement to analysts who track radical groups, concern is high about the possibility that violence could erupt, especially if the vote count drags on for days without a clear winner.

Full Article: Fear of violence high ahead of election day – The Washington Post

National: How the fight over mail-in ballots threatens to undermine the votes of American troops | James Clark/Task & Purpose

Marine Corps flying missions in support of ground forces and convoys overseas. “I was thinking the other day about some other elections, and talking to some friends,” said Cooper, a former Marine aviator who retired from the Corps in 2013 as a lieutenant colonel, and went on to found Veterans For American Ideals, a non-partisan political advocacy group. “You know, the most significant election in my own lifetime was in December 2005. And that wasn’t an American election. It was the Iraqi election.” When Cooper was deployed to Al Anbar province in Iraq with VMAQ-1, a Marine Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron, the elections were overshadowed by fears of violence, concerns that Iraqi citizens would denounce the results as fraudulent, and worries that voters wouldn’t have the patience to see the process through. “How ironic is it that I feel those same three things today?” Cooper said. This time around, it’s the U.S. election that’s been shadowed in doubt and uncertainty, following a presidential race that has been defined by its hyper-partisanship and long-held norms of peaceful transition of power and mail-in voting being called into question or politicized.

Full Article: Will military absentee votes matter in the 2020 election? – Task & Purpose

National: ‘To me, it’s voter suppression’: the Republican fight to limit ballot boxes | Jess Hardin/The Guardian

Source: ‘To me, it’s voter suppression’: the Republican fight to limit ballot boxes | US news | The Guardian

On the East Side of Youngstown, Ohio, a steady stream of early voters drop off completed absentee ballots into the new drop box outside the Mahoning county board of elections. Gloria Phifer is one of them. The 68-year-old retired mail carrier drove about 15 minutes to the former hospital-turned-county office center. She doesn’t mind walking, so she found a parking spot outside, walked up to the entrance and dropped her ballot into the red drop box – the only one in the county. “My fellow mail carriers, God bless them and everything, but I thought it would easier just to bring it down here,” Phifer said. “This is an important election and I wanted to just make sure [there were] no problems.” In response to safety concerns spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and worries about potential mail delays, drop boxes are popping up all over the country – in many places for the first time. The largely secure voting method has long been available to voters in states like Colorado and Washington. But amid the partisan battles over access to the polls, election officials in battleground states are still fighting to limit their usage with only days left until 3 November.

‘Like a yo-yo’: Election officials grapple with flood of confusing last-minute rule changes | Lucien Bruggeman/ABC

Local election administrators are scrambling to keep up with a crush of ongoing litigation winding its way through the courts, with some saying they feel like “yo-yos” caught in the middle of politically fraught legal battles over ballot deadlines and other voting rules. County and municipal clerks are already navigating an election season burdened by unprecedented challenges – with the coronavirus pandemic bearing down on key swing states and a record-setting number of voters casting their ballots by mail. The blizzard of legal challenges, conflicting rulings, deadline extensions and last-minute rule changes, has only compounded the confusion, several officials told ABC News. “It’s like a yo-yo,” said John Gleason, the election clerk in Genessee County, Michigan — a key swing state. “We get a directive, then a judge says ‘no.’ We get another directive, and the appeals court says ‘no.’ It has not been easy.” Partisans in at least 44 states have filed an unprecedented number of lawsuits tied to voting rules changes during the pandemic, according to a tally gathered by the Stanford-MIT Project on a Healthy Election — more than half of which remain pending or on appeal.

Full Article: ‘Like a yo-yo’: Election officials grapple with flood of confusing last-minute rule changes – ABC News

Ohio: Two conservative operatives charged in a robocall scam are ordered to call 85,000 people back | Kathleen Gray/The New York Times

Two conservative operatives, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who have been charged in Ohio and Michigan with election fraud for sending out tens of thousands of robocalls intended to deter people from voting, have been ordered by a federal judge to call those voters back and inform them that the original call “contained false information.” U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, in the Southern District of New York, said in his ruling on Wednesday that the initial robocall sent in August to 85,000 people, “cannot be described as anything but deliberate interference with voters’ rights to cast their ballots in any legal manner they choose.” Mr. Wohl, 22, and Mr. Burkman, 54, both of Arlington, Va., were charged last month in Michigan and indicted by a grand jury in Ohio this week, with sending deceptive robocalls to 85,000 people, mostly in minority communities, that stated authorities would use the information on their absentee ballot forms to create a database to track down people with arrest warrants or outstanding debt. According to Judge Marrero’s ruling on Wednesday, the pair must make calls to everyone who received the robocall and deliver this message: “At the direction of a United States district court, this call is intended to inform you that a federal court has found that the message you previously received regarding mail-in voting from Project 1599, a political organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, contained false information that has had the effect of intimidating voters, and thus interfering with the upcoming presidential election, in violation of federal voting-rights laws.”

Full Article: Two conservative operatives charged in a robocall scam are ordered to call 85,000 people back. – The New York Times

National: Election operations are holding up so far against a wave of hacks and technical failures | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

The week before Election Day has seen a wave of digital attacks on election systems and technical foul-ups, but officials are mostly parrying the blows to keep voting going on as planned. The most concerning hit came late yesterday, when the Wall Street Journal reported that hackers who compromised some election systems in Hall County, Ga., earlier this month had posted a small trove of nonpublic information, including voters’ social security numbers, as a ploy to persuade the county to pay a ransom. Officials’ greatest fear about such strikes, called ransomware attacks, is that hackers could seize voter registration databases and hold them hostage during voting so it becomes exceedingly difficult to check in voters. This is far from that worst case scenario because it hasn’t impeded any voting operations. But knowing that the act of voting put their personal data at risk is sure to have a chilling effect on some people. The hackers also teased the release as “example files,” which suggests they could release more sensitive and damaging information later.

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Election operations are holding up so far against a wave of hacks and technical failures – The Washington Post

Anxiety 2020: Voters worry about safety at the polls | Laurie Kellman/Associated Press

Gary Kauffman says he does not scare easily. So when men waving President Donald Trump flags drive by his house in downtown Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he stands on his front steps and waves a banner for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “Sometimes I yell at them. They yell back at me,” says Kauffman, 54. Still, Kauffman is keeping a closer eye on who they are and what they’re carrying as Election Day approaches. Tension has been rising in his town, known best as hallowed ground of the Civil War’s bloodiest battle. Recently, it’s become a hot spot of angry confrontations between Trump supporters and liberal protesters. Kauffman has seen some of the Trump supporters carrying weapons. “If there’s guns, I’m a bit more cautious,” he said on Monday. Americans aren’t accustomed to worrying about violence or safety ahead of an election. It’s a luxury afforded by years of largely peaceful voting, a recent history of fairly orderly displays of democracy. But after months filled with disease, disruption and unrest, Americans are worried that Election Day could become a flashpoint.

Full Article: Anxiety 2020: Voters worry about safety at the polls

National: Early Voting Shines Spotlight on Consolidated Voting-Equipment Market | Chris Cumming/Wall Street Journal

Leveraged-buyout firms are playing a key role in the 2020 elections: Companies they own are counting the flood of mail-in ballots, and that isn’t sitting well with some lawmakers. Two private-equity-owned companies dominate the market for high-speed ballot scanners and other voting equipment. Lawmakers have raised questions about the lack of transparency and competition in the industry, and more broadly over the role of private-equity firms in elections. Election Systems & Software LLC and Dominion Voting Systems Corp. together produce the technology used by over three-quarters of U.S. voters, according to a coming report by researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The third-largest player, Hart InterCivic, was owned by private-equity firm H.I.G. Capital from 2011 to this April, when it was quietly sold, according to H.I.G. Private-equity firms “have taken over nearly all of the nation’s election technology—and how they do business is clouded in secrecy,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in an email. Lawmakers including Sens. Warren and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) in December wrote that the private-equity-backed voting companies’ lack of transparency threatens the integrity of elections. Under private-equity ownership, the voting-machine market has consolidated through mergers. In a little over a decade, at least eight major vendors have consolidated to three, which control about 92% of the market, Wharton researchers said in 2017.

Full Article: Early Voting Shines Spotlight on Consolidated Voting-Equipment Market – WSJ

National: Fear Of Voter Intimidation Is Its Own Voter Intimidation | Maggie Koerth/FiveThirtyEight

In 1981, the Republican National Committee sent hundreds of armed, off-duty police officers to the polls in the state of New Jersey. Dressed in official-looking “National Ballot Security Task Force” armbands, they demanded voter registration cards from people waiting in line in heavily Black and Hispanic districts, turning some voters away and intimidating others into not voting at all. As my colleague Clare Malone has written, the whole thing was illegal. After a lawsuit, it led to a 37-year-long ban preventing the RNC from organizing poll watching efforts. This will be the first presidential election without the ban in place. It is also a presidential election where the incumbent has cast doubt on the trustworthiness of the election, toyed repeatedly with the idea of not giving up office and recruited thousands of poll watchers. It is also a presidential election where far-right militias and other supporters of the president have discussed showing up, armed, at polling sites. But despite that tension, neither experts in election law nor experts in militia and armed radical groups believe we are likely to see a repeat of what happened in New Jersey nearly four decades ago. Why? Partly, it’s because laws heavily restrict what poll watchers can do and how they can do it. And partly, experts told me, it’s because the actual job of poll watching is unlikely to appeal to the groups and individuals whose presence would be most dangerous.

Full Article: Fear Of Voter Intimidation Is Its Own Voter Intimidation | FiveThirtyEight

National: Maze Ransomware Is An Election Night Threat | Calvin Hennick/StateTech Magazine

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