National

Voters, campaigns and election officials in four states holding contests Tuesday are braced for a presidential primary day unlike any in memory, as the surging threat of the novel coronavirus has forced major changes at voting locations, rattled poll workers and left voters worried about how to cast their ballots. In Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio, election officials have raced to replace poll workers who have said they will not show Tuesday, supply thousands of precincts with sanitizing supplies, and notify voters whose polling locations, many in senior facilities, have been moved as a result of the pandemic. Voters, meanwhile, have flooded information hotlines. Among their urgent questions: where to vote, how to deliver a ballot if they are under quarantine and how to vote if they registered while attending a college that is now closed. As the coronavirus spreads, the Democratic Party of Puerto Rico announced Sunday that it would seek to postpone the territory’s March 29 primaries, joining Louisiana and Georgia. One New York election official said Sunday that discussions are underway about whether to delay that state’s contests. The rapidly changing landscape left officials worried about the threat of two equally dire outcomes Tuesday: chaos at voting places, with diminished staffs causing long lines and increasing the risk of exposure to the deadly virus; or low turnout levels fueled by public fear.

National: Governors say Tuesday’s presidential primaries will go on | Associated Press

The governors of Illinois and Ohio on Sunday confirmed their states’ presidential primaries will continue as scheduled on Tuesday, even amidst the coronavirus outbreak. “We’re going to go ahead,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican who has moved aggressively to close schools and other institutions to limit spread of the virus, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “But we’re telling people, again, to be careful.” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said his state is issuing similar warnings. “We’re going to go ahead with it,” Pritzker said of the primary. “But we’ve been extra careful at all of our polling places. Everybody is practicing good hygiene. And we’re making sure that it’s safe for people to come and vote. The schools are closed, so many people will be voting in schools. And there won’t be big crowds.” Arizona and Florida are also scheduled to vote Tuesday night. Early voting his been underway for weeks in all four states, which may limit the crush at polling places Tuesday. Some have worried that predominantly elderly poll workers and volunteers would be exposed to the disease amid crowds of voters.

National: Georgia, Louisiana Postpone Primaries Over Coronavirus Concern | Alexa Corse and Jon Kamps/Wall Street Journal

States across the country are grappling with how to hold their presidential nominating contests while keeping voters and poll workers shielded from the coronavirus. Georgia on Saturday postponed its March 24 primary until May 19 and paused in-person early voting, which had already begun. Louisiana said Friday it was postponing its April 4 primary, pushing it into June, and later-voting states such as Maryland and Pennsylvania are trying to figure out how to safely hold primaries as events across the U.S. are being rapidly canceled to limit the virus’s spread. Four states with primaries Tuesday—Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Illinois—assured voters they can safely turn out. They called for healthy poll workers to show up and provided guidance on keeping voting equipment clean, the chief election officials from the four states said in a joint statement Friday. “Unlike concerts, sporting events or other mass gatherings where large groups of people travel long distances to congregate in a confined space for an extended period of time, polling locations see people from a nearby community coming into and out of the building for a short duration,” the officials said. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged states to encourage early and mail-in voting when possible, or to encourage voters to come during off-peak times. The CDC also recommended cleaning and routinely disinfecting voting equipment, such as electronic voting machines.

National: Election Assistance Commission hires cybersecurity expert to help states with 2020 infrastructure | Sean Lyngaas/CyberScoop

The federal agency that oversees funding for states to secure their election equipment is hiring a cybersecurity expert versed in voting technology as it prepares for the 2020 election. Joshua Franklin will start in the coming weeks in a top cybersecurity position at the Election Assistance Commission, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. It is an effort by the EAC, a tiny agency with a big responsibility, to bolster the cybersecurity expertise it has on staff. Franklin, who spent six years as an engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is expected to protect EAC networks from hacking threats and support the commission’s cybersecurity work with state and local election officials. Franklin has been working as an election security advocate for years, drawing attention to the issue at hacking conferences. In 2018, Franklin presented research at DEF CON comparing the vulnerabilities in the websites of House and Senate candidates for the midterm elections. Franklin and others scanned the websites in their spare time and spent hours trying to contact administrators to fix them.

National: ‘Kill Chain’: HBO’s Election Security Doc Stresses Urgency | Lily Hay Newman/WIRED

In spite of documented Russian election meddling in the 2016 United States presidential election, and years of warnings from security researchers about insecure voting infrastructure, the US has moved slowly to improve its election defenses. Now a new documentary, Kill Chain, is attempting to lay out the urgency of taking action before it’s too late. Many of the problems and insecurities in voting systems across the United States are straightforward, yet it’s not easy to get voters—or lawmakers—to understand the risk or the path forward. That represents both a challenge and opportunity for Kill Chain, which like Netflix’s Cambridge Analytica documentary The Great Hack, tries to make an assortment of sometimes esoteric technical issues tangible and compelling. “It’s difficult material, which is why so many people don’t approach it and don’t cover it and don’t understand it,” filmmaker Sarah Teale tells WIRED. “That was definitely the hardest thing was to find the language of the film that made it make sense and made it some sort of a story.”

National: RSA Cryptographer Ronald Rivest Seeks Secure Elections the Low-Tech Way | Susan D’Agostino/Quanta Magazine

onald Rivest sports a white beard, smiles with his eyes and bestows his tech gifts on the people of the world. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor is the “R” in RSA, which means that he, along with Adi Shamir (the “S”) and Leonard Adleman (the “A”), gave us one of the first public key cryptosystems. It’s still common today: Nearly all internet-based commercial transactions rely on this algorithm, for which the trio was awarded the 2002 A.M. Turing Award, essentially the Nobel Prize of computing. In recent decades, Rivest has continued to work on making it computationally hard for adversaries to break a system, though he now focuses on ensuring that votes in democratic elections are cast as intended, collected as cast and tallied as collected. Elections, he has discovered, have stricter requirements than nearly any other security application, including internet-based commerce. Unlike online bank accounts and the customer names with which they are affiliated, ballots in an election must be stripped of voters’ names because of voting’s secrecy requirement. But the ballot box’s anonymity sets conditions for real or perceived tampering, which makes proving the accuracy of tallies important to voters, election officials and candidates. Another requirement is that voters can’t receive receipts verifying their candidate selections, lest the practice encourage vote selling or coercion. But without a receipt, voters might wonder if their votes were faithfully and accurately counted. It’s a tough problem to crack, and Rivest thinks the solution lies not with fancier computers, but with pen, paper and mathematics. “I mainly argue for some process by which we have confidence in our election results,” he said. “No one should say, ‘It’s right because the computer said so.’”

National: How 4 Big States Are Preparing to Vote as the Coronavirus Spreads | Nick Corasaniti and Patricia Mazzei/The New York Times

Elections officials in the next four Democratic primary states are taking extra precautions before voters head to the polls on Tuesday, as the coronavirus upends the 2020 race and people worry about gatherings and places where they might become infected. There are no plans to cancel primaries in the four states — Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Arizona — and officials are expressing confidence that ballots can be safely cast. Each secretary of state has sent out regular updates, reiterating recommendations from federal officials about preventive measures to stop the spread of the virus, and encouraging voting by mail or early voting. In all four states, the counties run the elections, but state officials have been trying to underscore the new basics of voting, like keeping hand sanitizer at polling locations and making sure local officials properly clean machines. At this point, none of the states are considering expanding polling hours or mail-in-ballot deadlines. The preparations for voting in the age of a pandemic have not led to far-reaching changes. Perhaps the most significant shift for Tuesday’s elections will be the relocation of polling stations away from areas where older people live, like assisted living facilities.

National: Coronavirus forcing changes in campaigning and voting | The Boston Globe

The coronavirus outbreak is colliding with the presidential election and the ramifications are being felt on the campaign trail and at polling places. “Campaigning and conventions could change,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine’s law school, raising the possibility of virtual nominating conventions this summer if the outbreak continues. The effects were clear Tuesday night, when former vice president Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders both canceled election night rallies in Cleveland after Ohio’s governor discouraged large gatherings. On Wednesday, Biden’s campaign said it had formed a six-person public health advisory committee to provide “expert advice regarding steps the campaign should take to minimize health risks for the candidate, staff, and supporters.” After consulting with those experts and at the request of local officials, the Biden campaign announced it was shifting “large crowd” events scheduled for Friday in Chicago and Monday in Miami to “virtual events.” And after initially resisting changing Trump’s schedule, the White House and his campaign on Wednesday night cancelled or postponed three upcoming events. At the same time, state election officials are taking steps to adjust voting procedures to keep the virus from spreading. Washington state told voters not to lick the envelopes of their absentee ballots, Ohio is moving polling places for next Tuesday’s primary from senior centers to avoid infecting older people, and Chicago will make paper ballots available for voters who don’t want to use touch screen machines in the Illinois primary, also next week.

National: States urge alternative voting methods ahead of Tuesday primaries | Kevin Collier/NBC

As coronavirus continues to spread, election officials in the four states holding presidential primaries next Tuesday are encouraging Americans to vote by unconventional means to avoid crowds. That usually means voting by mail or voting early to avoid large crowds in states where those things are an option — as is the case in those holding primaries March 17. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the coronavirus a pandemic Wednesday, and has recommended that election officials“[e]ncourage voters to use voting methods that minimize direct contact with other people and reduce crowd size at polling stations.” “We have really been pushing as much as we can for voters who are concerned by polling places to take advantage of voting by mail,” Matt Dietrich, public affairs officer at the Illinois State Board of Elections, told NBC News. “That’s obviously the easiest way to avoid any kind of exposure to crowds, or lines or other people.” Thursday is the deadline for Illinois voters to apply to vote by mail, he said. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said that it was still safe to vote in person, although voters who were nervous still had time to register to vote by mail or could vote early to avoid crowds.

National: From handshakes to kissing babies, virus upends campaigning | Alexandra Jaffe/Associated Press

Podiums get sanitized before the candidate steps up to speak. Fist or elbow bumps take the place of handshakes, and kissing babies is out of the question. Rallies are canceled, leaving candidates speaking to a handful of journalists and staffers instead of cheering crowds of thousands. This is campaigning in the age of the coronavirus, when fears of the new pandemic’s rapid spread are upending Joe Biden’s and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns. The urgency of the issue comes at a pivotal time in the Democratic presidential primary, as Biden is beginning to pull ahead as a front-runner for the nomination and as Sanders is scrambling to catch up. “If coronavirus has the lasting impact that we all fear it will, it will also dramatically reshape the way a presidential campaign unfolds,” said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist and former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Politics is fundamentally about leaders interacting with the people who they represent, and if a pandemic forecloses that ability, it changes everything — how you campaign, how you knock doors, how you do events and how you do the retail part of politics.”

National: Elections officials scramble for options as coronavirus worries mount | Elise Viebeck /The Washington Post

Elections officials have stocked up on hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes. Many are urging voters to cast absentee ballots or vote early to avoid crowds. But as the coronavirus pandemic worsens, local and state officials are scrambling to identify other options if public health leaders ultimately determine that there are risks to visiting polling places — an assessment that could change the basic mechanics of running an election midstream in a presidential campaign year. “If you’re talking about something on that level, then we’re clearly facing a crisis and not just an emergency, and public health and safety will have to dictate whatever we do,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who said he would follow the advice of public health officials and law enforcement. “One of the very few things that would take precedent over a free and fair election is public health and safety, right?” LaRose said, adding that such a move would be a last resort. The spiraling covid-19 pandemic that has shaken the global economy and upended millions of Americans’ routines in the past month has emerged in the past week as a unique and unprecedented challenge for elections officials already grappling with a range of threats such as online disinformation and security vulnerabilities. While many jurisdictions have emergency plans in cases of natural disasters or power grid failures, there has been little planning for a health pandemic that could keep the public quarantined inside their homes, experts said.

National: Government report offers guidelines to prevent nationwide cyber catastrophe | Maggie Miller/The Hill

A much-anticipated government report aimed at defending the nation against cyber threats in the years to come opens with a bleak preview of what could happen if critical systems were brought down. “The water in the Potomac still has that red tint from where the treatment plants upstream were hacked, their automated systems tricked into flushing out the wrong mix of chemicals,” the Cyberspace Solarium Commission wrote in the opening lines of its report. “By comparison, the water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has a purple glint to it. They’ve pumped out the floodwaters that covered Washington’s low-lying areas after the region’s reservoirs were hit in a cascade of sensor hacks,” it continues. So begins the report two years in the making from a congressionally mandated commission made up of lawmakers and top Trump administration officials, pointing to the vulnerabilities involved with critical systems being hooked up to the internet.

National: Coronavirus threatens to pose an unprecedented challenge to the 2020 elections | Isaac Stanley-Becker and Elise Viebeck/The Washington Post

When asked what kept him up at night, Ben Wikler, who is responsible for delivering a must-win state in November as chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, used to answer, “unknown unknowns.” He no longer has to wonder what such a risk might look like. Presidential campaigns, parties and state election officials are scrambling to heed health warnings while safeguarding the democratic process against a growing coronavirus epidemic whose scope is difficult to predict. Their planning has included advising voters not to lick their mail-in ballots, relocating polling places away from senior living communities, and weighing whether to move forward with plans to bring tens of thousands of visitors from around the world to Milwaukee and Charlotte for the planned Democratic and Republican summer conventions, respectively. Former vice president Joe Biden’s digital staff was envisioning options for virtual campaigning if sweeping changes were necessary. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign already has an elaborate streaming operation, which it said it could tap in the event that campaigning is curtailed. Already, both campaigns have been providing hand sanitizer at events. Over the weekend, the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, canceled a presidential forum scheduled for Thursday in Orlando, where Biden and Sanders (I-Vt.), the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, had been scheduled to appear. It was the first such cancellation to have been attributed to the coronavirus’s spread.

National: Primaries show high volume of absentee voting as states grapple with coronavirus | Meg Cunningham , Kendall Karson and Quinn Scanlan/ABC

Against a backdrop of coronavirus concerns, early signs from across the six states voting in Tuesday’s primaries showed a high volume of voters turning to absentee options. Yet several state and party officials who ABC spoke with pushed back against the notion that turnout would be affected. Washington, which is vote-by-mail only, is the state with the most confirmed cases of COVID-19. But Kylee Zabel, the communications director in the secretary of state’s office, said they “haven’t heard of any concerns that people have expressed” regarding the coronavirus. As Washington uses only mail-in ballots, a tweet last week instructed voters, “Whether healthy or sick, please don’t lick!” after state health officials recommended voters seal ballots using alternative methods like a sponge. The secretary of state’s office said it recommended that ballot counters use gloves, but in King County — which includes Seattle — Elections Division Chief of Staff Kendall Hodson told ABC News that the practice is mandatory. Hodson also said that there were regular hand-washing breaks for ballot counters, and at the six vote centers in the county where people can do same-day registration, there was extra hand sanitizer available. The Elections Division was also asking people who were feeling sick to contact them so they could try to accommodate them.

National: Election officials rush to make changes to address coronavirus concerns | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Election officials around the country are rushing to make last-minute changes to address coronavirus concerns – seeking to avoid panic, staff shortages and delays that could impose additional hurdles for primary voters on election day.Many of the changes have to do with protecting older people, the demographic most at risk for having serious complications from the virus. In Ohio Frank LaRose, the secretary of state, ordered all polling stations located in senior centers and nursing homes to be moved. The change is expected to affect 128 of the state’s polling locations for its 17 March primary, and local officials are identifying alternative sites. Election officials in Chicago, also holding its primary next week, announced the city was relocating polling stations out of nursing homes. It’s not just voters, however, who are at risk. In 2016, about 56% of poll workers across the country were over 61 years old, according to the US Election Assistance Commission, which collected data from about half of the workers that year. Tammy Patrick, a former election official in Arizona, said administrators should consider hiring youth poll workers and overstaff to prepare for cancellations.

National: Voting by mail, already on the rise, may get a $500 million federal boost from coronavirus fears | Craig Timberg/The Washington Post

Sen. Ron Wyden (D) is proposing $500 million of federal funding to help states prepare for possible voting disruptions caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Wyden’s bill also would give Americans the option to vote by mail in case of a widespread emergency. The legislation, to be filed Wednesday, could boost a national trend toward voting by mail. In the 1990s, Wyden’s home state of Oregon became the first state to vote entirely by mail, and the practice has grown to the point that more than 31 million Americans — about one-quarter of all voters — cast ballots by mail in 2018. Election officials and experts in recent days have been considering how they would handle a major disease outbreak in which quarantines or closures of facilities would affect Americans’ ability to vote in primary elections, party caucuses and the November general election. While all states allow voting by mail in some circumstances, the availability of the option remains uneven, with some states allowing it to only seniors or those with excuses for why they can’t appear at polling places on Election Day. Five Western states conduct all of their statewide voting by mail, and a sixth, California, is gradually shifting to the practice. The wide variation in practices could make it difficult to rapidly expand voting by mail in time for this November’s election. States that handle few mail-in ballots might struggle to build the systems and acquire the machinery, such as high-speed optical scanners, needed to expand the option.

National: Russia stoking U.S. racial, social differences ahead of election: sources | Mark Hosenball/Reuters

American intelligence and security officials on Tuesday will brief Congress about how Russia has been using social media to stoke racial and social differences ahead of this year’s general election, three sources familiar with the presentations said. U.S. government experts will say, in classified briefings to the full U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, that Russian social media efforts are currently more directed at stirring up social divisiveness than promoting particular U.S. presidential candidates, the sources said. Among specific issues Russian trolls are seeking to exploit are gun control, ethnic group rivalries, tensions between police and local communities, and abortion, the sources said. On abortion, the United States has evidence that Russian cyber-operatives are using social media to stir up antagonism on both sides of the issue, one of the sources said. One of the Russians’ objectives appeared to be to use disagreements over social issues to stir violence, the source said.

National: Trump administration officials brief Congress on election security | Olivia Gazis/CBS

Top law enforcement and intelligence community officials briefed members of Congress on election security in a pair of panels Tuesday afternoon, telling lawmakers they had “nothing to support” the notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin favored one candidate or another or had ordered actions on any given candidate’s behalf. They said the Russian government’s objective was to sow discord in U.S. political processes, sources said. Three sources familiar with Tuesday’s briefing said there were inconsistencies between the election security assessment delivered Tuesday and the one given to the House Intelligence Committee last month. It appeared to two sources familiar with both February’s and Tuesday’s briefings that the assessment delivered Tuesday was crafted to avoid saying the Russian government had established a preference for Mr. Trump, a conclusion that had been expressed by representatives from multiple intelligence agencies before that panel in February. Lawmakers were also briefed last month on Russia’s efforts to boost Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Separately, three sources also said the intelligence community has not yet furnished intelligence that members of both parties had requested in the February closed-door session that supported the assessment that the Russian government had developed a preference for President Trump.

National: Coronavirus and 2020 Elections: What Happens to Voting in an Outbreak | Kirk Johnson and Campbell Robertson/The New York Times

Elections are complicated events, involving massive amounts of paperwork, thorny issues of law and a widely scattered cast of poll workers and ballot counters. In Washington State, which is holding its 2020 primary on Tuesday, there is another matter that officials are having to consider this year. “How long does coronavirus last in saliva that is on an envelope?” asked Kim Wyman, the secretary of state in Washington, the state hardest hit by the virus so far. Washington votes by mail, which eliminates most concerns about viral transmission, but also creates some. “We’re telling all of the people who handle incoming ballots to use gloves,” Ms. Wyman said. “We’ve also had a recommendation from National Guard: ‘Folks, you might consider masks.’” Voters have been advised to use a wet sponge or cloth to seal envelopes rather than licking them. But many were probably mailed in before it was clear how big a virus risk there was in the state. The leading Democratic presidential candidates, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Bernie Sanders, both addressed questions on Sunday about how the virus might affect their travel and campaigning. Public health officials have said adults over 60 are most at risk and should avoid crowds. Mr. Biden is 77. Mr. Sanders is 78. President Trump is 73.

National: Election security: GAO warns of issues this year and chides federal security agency | Joe Davidson/The Washington Post

Just as the presidential primary season began, a government watchdog warned the Trump administration that it “urgently needed” to address problems with election security infrastructure. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), part of the Department of Homeland Security, was to have finalized plans by January to support states and localities with their election security operations. That did not happen, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. While noting that state election officials generally “were very satisfied with CISA’s election-related work,” the report said the agency “is not well-positioned to execute a nationwide strategy for securing election infrastructure prior to the start of the 2020 election cycle” because it has not completed plans. As if to prove the point, shortly before the GAO findings were released in February, the Iowa caucuses ended in a debacle when a new app for reporting results failed, plunging the first contest of the season into disarray. Then, during Super Tuesday last week, voting machine malfunctions and other technical problems combined with higher than expected turnout, leaving some voters in Texas and California waiting hours to cast ballots.

National: Acting intelligence chief will not brief lawmakers on election security despite expectation he was coming | Alex Marquardt and Zachary Cohen/CNN

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said late Monday he will not be briefing lawmakers on Tuesday about election security despite being expected on Capitol Hill by members of Congress to be on the panel of the country’s most senior national security officials. Grenell had been due to appear alongside the other senior officials in a pair of classified briefings to all members of the House and Senate. A list of top agency officials obtained by CNN from two congressional sources and a person familiar with the plans listed Grenell alongside National Security Agency Director Gen. Paul Nakasone, FBI Director Christopher Wray and others. As of late Monday night, the list and guidance circulated to Congress had not changed. However, Grenell and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence denied that he would be briefing. Grenell’s office would not explain why his name was on the list sent around by multiple congressional offices, and did not respond to requests for comment until after CNN reported Grenell was expected to appear. In a message, Grenell told CNN the expectation was “fake info” and said the intention was always to send “experts.”

National: U.S. Vote Foundation Calls on Congress to Mandate a Nationwide “No Excuse” Vote-by-Mail Option Across All States for 2020 Elections

U.S. Vote Foundation (US Vote) today called for the United States Congress to issue a requirement that all states remove any and all barriers to vote-by-mail/absentee ballot request across all states at all levels, federal, state and municipal, for all 2020 elections including primaries, special, runoff and general elections. “Ensuring voters can vote from home is a responsible and forward-thinking policy action that Congress should include in its response to the current public health situation,” said Michael Steele, Chairman of US Vote and its Overseas Vote initiative. “It is impossible for voters to predict whether they will be healthy and able to vote in-person. They should be assured they can vote safely with an absentee vote-by-mail ballot.” US Vote’s State Voting Methods and Options shows that while 32 states allow voters to request a ballot by mail without providing a reason, or what is commonly called an excuse for not going to the polls, there remains 19 states and 5 territories that do not. These include high population states like Texas and New York.

National: Coronavirus Likely Won’t Disrupt Upcoming Primaries, But Absentee Voting Could Surge | Martin Austermuhle/WAMU