National

Election security concerns for state and local governments have not gone away during the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, they’ve only grown more urgent. Those concerns are mounting as states argue they do not have enough leeway to use the $400 million Congress appropriated for election security this spring, and “a coalition of more than 200 public-interest groups are pushing hard for Congress to include $3.6 billion for the 2020 election cycle in the next coronavirus relief bill,” as The New York Times Magazine reports. Some states are considering moving to online voting because of concerns about having residents congregate at polling places. However, that move is something security experts are strongly cautioning against because of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The Guardian reports the Department of Homeland Security opposed such moves in a draft guidance, warning that casting ballots over the internet is “a ‘high-risk’ endeavor that would allow attackers to alter votes and results ‘at scale’ and compromise the integrity of elections.” The challenges posed by the pandemic are making a complicated security picture even more complex for state and local election officials. They need to remember all of the election security concerns that existed in January are still out there and are now more difficult to tackle — and they include malicious actors spreading disinformation and attackers targeting voting databases. All of those concerns need to be addressed between now and November.

National: States push millions of people toward absentee voting amid pandemic | Reid Wilson/The Hill

State and local election administrators are pushing millions of voters to cast their ballots by mail in upcoming elections amidst a pandemic that could spread widely where people gather. The applications raise the prospect of a massive surge of ballots pouring into election administration offices in the days leading up to the presidential election. They have also raised the ire of President Trump, who on Wednesday accused two states of acting illegally and raised the prospects of punishing those states by withholding funding. At least 32 million people have already received or will soon receive absentee ballot applications in the mail, either for upcoming primary elections or November’s general elections. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) said Tuesday her office would mail an absentee ballot application to all 7.7 million registered voters in her state. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate (R) said last month they would send applications to every active voter in their states, too. “The safety of voters while casting their ballots is our top priority,” Pate said when he announced the mailings. “The safest way to vote will be by mail.”

National: The mail voting debate gets more confounding | David Weigel/The Washington Post

On Tuesday, as he celebrated the arrival of two new Republican colleagues, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was asked whether he really had a problem with mail-in voting. Rep. Mike Garcia of California had won an election that relied heavily on mail-in ballots, and so had Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin. So, what was the problem? “We don’t have a problem if someone votes by mail,” McCarthy said. “The problem we have is if you try to federalize the election.” One day later, President Trump attacked Democrats in Nevada and Michigan for expanding vote-by-mail. In one tweet, he threatened to “hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path,” and in another he threatened the same if Nevada sent out “illegal vote by mail ballots, creating a great Voter Fraud scenario.” Since the start of the pandemic, vote-by-mail has been expanded in multiple states. The debate over that expansion has grown increasingly surreal and politically contradictory. As they ramp up their own absentee ballot programs, aimed at their base, state and national Republican committees have sued to stop states from making vote-by-mail easier, conducted polling to suggest that voters want limits on the process, and highlighted stories about the difficulty of quickly implementing all-mail elections.

National: Trump threatens funding for Michigan, Nevada over absentee, mail-in voting plans | Amy Gardner, Josh Dawsey, Jeff Stein and John Wagner/The Washington Post

President Trump on Wednesday escalated his campaign to discredit the integrity of mail balloting, threatening to “hold up” federal funding to Michigan and Nevada in response to the states’ plans to increase voting by mail to reduce the public’s exposure to the coronavirus. Without evidence, Trump called the two states’ plans “illegal,” and he incorrectly claimed that Michigan’s “rogue” secretary of state is planning to mail ballots to all voters. The state is planning to send applications for mail-in ballots to all voters — not ballots themselves. “This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State,” Trump tweeted about Michigan. “I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!” Trump later corrected the error and suggested he would not need to withhold federal money, but he did not retreat from his claim that both states are taking steps that will encourage voter fraud. A spokesman for the Trump campaign asserted that the Michigan secretary of state did not have legal authority to send ballot applications to all voters, a claim that she disputed.

National: Trump’s mail voting attacks put him at odds with GOP election officials | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

President Trump’s attacks on voting by mail during the pandemic are putting him increasingly at odds with Republican election officials. The president’s harshest salvo to date threatened in a pair of tweets to withhold federal funding from Michigan and Nevada over their efforts to increase voting by mail. He falsely claimed the states, which have Democratic governors, were violating the law by sending absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. But the president’s attacks come as Republican officeholders in at least 16 states that don’t have all-mail elections have encouraged residents to vote absentee due to coronavirus. Republican-led states – including Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska and West Virginia – have also implemented the same system that Trump just attacked in Michigan and Nevada. And Nevada’s own secretary of state, who runs the elections there, is a Republican. The attacks are increasingly leaving Trump — who voted by mail himself in Florida this year — exposed as Republican election officials ignore his warnings given the anticipated public health risks of in-person voting during a pandemic.

National: As Trump Rails Against Voting by Mail, States Open the Door for It | Michael Wines/The New York Times

By threatening on Wednesday to withhold federal grants to Michigan and Nevada if those states send absentee ballots or applications to voters, President Trump has taken his latest stand against what is increasingly viewed as a necessary option for voting amid a pandemic. What he has not done is stop anyone from getting an absentee ballot. In the face of a pandemic, what was already limited opposition to letting voters mail in their ballots has withered. Eleven of the 16 states that limit who can vote absentee have eased their election rules this spring to let anyone cast an absentee ballot in upcoming primary elections — and in some cases, in November as well. Another state, Texas, is fighting a court order to do so. Four of those 11 states are mailing ballot applications to registered voters, just as Michigan and Nevada are doing. And that does not count 34 other states and the District of Columbia that already allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot, including five states in which voting by mail is the preferred method by law. “Every once in a while you get the president of the United States popping up and screaming against vote-by-mail, but states and both political parties are organizing their people for it,” said Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “It’s a bizarre cognitive dissonance.”

National: Here’s the problem with mail-in ballots: They might not be counted. | Enrijeta Shino, Mara Suttmann-Lea and Daniel A. Smith/The Washington Post

State and local officials across the country are making difficult decisions about how to enable citizens to vote without jeopardizing their health. One widely discussed approach involves allowing more people to vote by mail, lowering the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus. Most Americans support that option for this November’s election. And for good reason: Those of us who study mail voting agree that it has little effect on election results because it has a marginal impact on turnout and doesn’t give either party an advantage. But voting by mail increases the number of ballots that are rejected — and not counted in the final tally. And ballots from younger, minority and first-time voters are most likely to be thrown out. Here’s how we know.

National: Trump Steps Up Attacks on Mail Vote, Making False Claims About Fraud | Reid J. Epstein, Nick Corasaniti and Annie Karni/The New York Times

President Trump on Wednesday escalated his assault against mail voting, falsely claiming that Michigan and Nevada were engaged in voter fraud and had acted illegally, and threatening to withhold federal funds to those states if they proceed in expanding vote-by-mail efforts. The president inaccurately accused Michigan of sending mail ballots to its residents. In fact, the secretary of state in Michigan sent applications for mail ballots, as election officials have done in other states, including those led by Republicans. In Nevada, where the Republican secretary of state declared the primary an all mail election, ballots are being sent to voters. The Twitter posts were the latest in a series of broadsides the president has aimed at a process that has become the primary vehicle for casting ballots in an electoral system transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. As most states largely abandon in-person voting because of health concerns, Mr. Trump, along with many of his Republican allies, have launched a series of false attacks to demonize mail voting as fraught with fraud and delivering an inherent advantage to Democratic candidates — despite there being scant evidence for either claim.

National: Two primaries underscore dueling paths to holding elections during coronavirus pandemic | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Voters got a split-screen view of pandemic-era elections yesterday in Oregon and Kentucky. Both states were scheduled to conduct their presidential primaries, but only Oregon, where voters cast ballots almost entirely by mail, carried it off. The state had tallied results from about 75 percent of 1.2 million ballots it received as of early this morning and declared winners in most major races. Former vice president Joe Biden, the last remaining Democratic presidential candidate, handily won the state’s presidential primary with about 70 percent of votes. Kentucky, where just about 2 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail in 2018, delayed its primary until June 23. Now, the state is scrambling to rebuild its voting operations from the ground up in just a matter of months. The split demonstrates how some states are facing far greater challenges preparing for the primaries and general election during the pandemic — and how some voters are in greater danger of facing a choice between casting their votes and protecting their health.

National: Trump Is Threatening to Go Ukraine on Michigan Because They’ll Let People Vote By Mail During a Pandemic | Jack Holmes/Esquire

Just to recap a presidential abuse of power from 14 years—whoops, three months—ago, the president withheld vital aid to a United States ally, Ukraine, until the government of that country agreed to ratfuck the 2020 presidential election for his personal benefit. When he was impeached on the basis he’d misused the powers of his office in an attempt to extort a foreign country until it acted to undermine our democracy to help him get reelected, Pamela Karlan, a legal scholar from Stanford, testified in favor of his removal from office on those grounds. She also offered a future hypothetical. “Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that’s prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided. What would you think if that president said, ‘I would like you to do us a favor. I’ll meet with you, and I’ll send the disaster relief, once you brand my opponent a criminal.’ Wouldn’t you know in your gut that such a president had abused his office, that he had betrayed the national interest, and that he was trying to corrupt the electoral process?”

National: America Is Woefully Unprepared for a COVID-19 Election—And More Than a Million Votes Are at Stake | Ken Stern/Vanity Fair

On Monday advocates for minority voters and voters with disabilities filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to make sweeping changes in election practices in Wisconsin. After a shambolic primary, marked by clashes between the Democratic governor and the Republican-controlled legislature, last-minute court battles, and mail-ballot stumbles, the lawsuit argues that officials will need to make dramatic changes to rectify the failures of the April primary and comply with the requirements of the U.S. Constitution, the Voting Rights Act, and the Americans With Disabilities Act. (A spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission declined ABC News’s request for comment.) Last month more than 1 million Wisconsin voters turned to mail voting, overwhelming state officials. Many towns couldn’t adequately staff polling places, as volunteers, many of them elderly, were hesitant to work. Only five voting locations were open in Milwaukee, with voters waiting up to two and a half hours to cast their votes. In a call with reporters last week, Senator Amy Klobuchar described images of voters wearing garbage bags as makeshift personal protective equipment, which she acidly contrasted with “the president of the United States [who] was able to vote in the luxury of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” It could have been far worse. Wendy Weiser, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, told me that Wisconsin is a “marker for all that can go wrong.” She noted that April 7 was only a lightly contested primary election, and that pitfalls would have been multiplied in a heavily trafficked general election. The specter haunting election officials across the country is a November repeat of Wisconsin 50 times over.

National: Coronavirus has made the 2020 election a perfect storm for voting rights lawsuits | Jon Ward/Yahoo News

The 2020 election is setting up a legal battle of historic proportions over voting rights, said the top Democratic attorney in the thick of the fight. “There’s been more voting rights litigation this election cycle already than there was in all of 2016, by a lot,” said Marc Elias, a D.C.-based lawyer with a long history in the political trenches. “There may be more voting rights litigation in 2020 already than there was in 2016 and 2012 combined. It is on an order of magnitude,” Elias said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast. And the situation is being exacerbated by the coronavirus outbreak, which could require an unprecedented increase in mail-in voting this November. Elias, who was the top campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, said he currently has 32 active lawsuits in 16 states, with about three-quarters of those suits having been filed since last November. Republicans are not sitting idly by either. The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have budgeted $20 million for court fights over voting rights.

National: Democrats try again with sweeping mail voting requirements | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

Despite an earlier failed attempt, Democrats tried again Friday to adopt a massive expansion of voting by mail during the coronavirus outbreak, including $3.6 billion in funding for states to adjust their election systems to deal with the pandemic. The money was included in a $3 trillion coronavirus response bill that was passed Friday by the Democratic-led House. But it has no chance of moving forward. The Republican-led Senate opposes the bill, and the White House has vowed to veto it. The most controversial aspect of the election funding section of the bill is another round of mandates that Democrats wish to place on states to ensure they have fair and safe elections at a time when crowded polling stations are a potential health risk. The bill would require states to end requirements that voters get a legal excuse to request an absentee ballot, mandate 15 days of early voting and order states to mail a ballot to every voter during emergencies. The Senate blocked similar requirements in a coronavirus relief bill in March.

National: The Cyberspace Solarium Commission Makes Its Case to Congress | William Ford/Lawfare

During a videoconference on May 13, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission made its case to Congress that the U.S. should adopt a strategy of layered cyber deterrence, a three-pronged plan to reduce the frequency of and the damage wrought by cyberattacks targeting America. The commission’s proposal follows 11 months of intense internal deliberation. During that time, the task force worked to answer the question Congress established it to address: What strategic approach should the federal government take to defending the United States in cyberspace? On March 11, the commission unveiled its vision in an exhaustive report detailing the concept of layered cyber deterrence. The commission’s members—two senators, two representatives, four executive branch officials and six private experts—packed the report with scores of policy recommendations, including 57 legislative proposals, which delineate exactly how to execute the novel cyber strategy. The report’s recommendations are designed to be turned into bills, ushered swiftly through Congress, and implemented. To that end, the commission transmitted its legislative proposals directly to the relevant House and Senate committees, some of which have begun the work of incorporating the commission’s ideas into legislation. But more than two months passed between the release of the commission’s report and the first time the task force got to discuss its proposals in public testimony before lawmakers.

National: Suits filed across US challenging mail-in voting obstacles | Jacob Dougherty/JURIST

With an expected increase in mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, voter rights advocates have filed lawsuits across the country challenging existing obstacles in states’ mail-in voting procedures. Challenges to mail-in voter restrictions have been filed in Tennessee, Texas, Minnesota, Georgia and North Carolina, among others. Some challenges primarily address the general restrictions states have placed on who can receive a mail-in ballot. For example, in Texas, according to Texas Election Code § 82.002, “a qualified voter is eligible for early voting by mail if the voter has a sickness or physical condition that prevents the voter from appearing at the polling place on election day.” The plaintiffs in the federal court case contend that all voters qualify for mail-in voting under this provision. In Tennessee, the same argument is being made for the state’s Excuse Requirement, which allows an “excuse,” or reason for a mail-in ballot, for voters who are “hospitalized, ill or physically disabled, and because of such condition, [are] unable to appear at [their] polling place on election day.”

National: Voting During Coronavirus: Will We Have Universal Vote-by-Mail by November? | Emilie Mutert/NBC

The experts are clear: The coronavirus will be here through the summer and will stick around through November’s general election. An American presidential election has never been postponed or canceled, but with warnings from health officials discouraging crowds – which are generally unavoidable at polling places – officials are in many cases already working to ensure they have the extra resources needed to implement vote-by-mail on an expanded scale. “It’s either going to be vote-by-mail or nothing if we have to deal with a worst-case scenario,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who along with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is sponsoring an emergency bill to expand vote-by-mail, has said. Others say vote-by-mail would have to be part of a suite of responses, such as extended early in-person voting with crowd controls and “curbside voting,” which allows voters concerned about entering a polling place to return a ballot without leaving their car, NBC News reported.

National: Freed by Court Ruling, Republicans Step Up Effort to Patrol Voting | Michael Wines/The New York Times

Six months before a presidential election in which turnout could matter more than persuasion, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are mounting an aggressive national effort to shape who gets to vote in November — and whose ballots are counted. Its premise is that a Republican victory in November is imperiled by widespread voter fraud, a baseless charge embraced by President Trump, but repeatedly debunked by research. Democrats and voting rights advocates say the driving factor is politics, not fraud — especially since Mr. Trump’s narrow win in 2016 underscored the potentially crucial value of depressing turnout by Democrats, particularly minorities. The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and President Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

National: Risks Overshadow Benefits with Online Voting, Experts Warn | Lucas Ropek/Government Technology

Government officials have expressed mounting concerns for how the COVID-19 virus could diminish voter turnout during the 2020 presidential election. As a partial solution, a handful of states have turned to Internet voting pilot programs: New Jersey, Delaware and West Virginia have all recently launched pilots, most of which are limited in scope and focus mainly on alleviating barriers for disabled and overseas voters. However, the computer science community — long critical of internet voting — sees the programs as a slippery slope towards a looming security risk. David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University, is one of the prolific naysayers. Having spent much of his career researching holes in software code, Dill said that there is just simply no way to ensure that devices and apps are free of malware that might manipulate a voter’s choices. Similarly, a hacker from an adversarial foreign government could always theoretically hack their way into these systems and change or manipulate votes. “Between your keyboard and your vote going into an electronic ballot box on the other end of the Internet, there are a lot of bad things that could happen,” he said. “This problem is not fixable, at least not in practical terms.”

National: What to make of HBO’s ‘Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections’ | Abel Morales/The Fifth Domain

With the election now only months away, officials are desperately trying to find solutions to protect the integrity of our election systems. The big question that remains is, “Will it work?” Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections is a new HBO documentary that takes viewers through a journey to discover the weaknesses of today’s election technology. Being a security engineer, it is my job to help analyze some of the techniques that hackers are using in order to better protect the organizations I serve. I decided to watch Kill Chain to understand the minds of the adversaries who are conducting the attacks on our election system. Below are my takeaways from the film. In the documentary, one of the hackers at DEF CON successfully took over a voting machine and forced the system to shut down. The hacker achieved command line access. Within a three-day period, hackers learned from the presenter and found dozens of vulnerabilities. These were just hackers at a three-day conference limited to the resources they held within the conference center. Nation-state attackers have the time and resources to acquire these machines, identify the vulnerabilities and plan a strategic and coordinated attack to impact an election.

National: Senate panel submits final volume of Russian interference probe for classification review | Olivia Beavers/The Hill

The Senate Intelligence Committee announced Friday it has submitted the fifth and final volume of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election for classification review, marking one of the last steps before the sprawling probe concludes. The committee sent the fifth bipartisan report, which pertains to its counterintelligence findings, to the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for review. The panel also said it submitted nearly 1,000 pages with redaction recommendations in the hopes that it may help speed up the review process for an unclassified version of the report to be approved. “The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has submitted the fifth and final volume of its bipartisan investigative report into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election to the Office of Director of National Intelligence for classification review,” said Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.), who have led the panel’s Russia probe. The committee previously released four other volumes that examined election security, Russia’s disinformation campaign, the Obama administration’s handling of Russian interference and the committee’s review of the intelligence community assessment.

National: Commission that pushed a cybersecurity overhaul hopes coronavirus boosts the effort | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

The lawmakers behind an ominous report about America’s lack of preparedness for a major cyberattack are hoping the coronavirus pandemic will boost their calls to overhaul the nation’s digital defenses. The Cyberspace Solarium Commission on March 11 released its 182-page report calling for a far more muscular stance against U.S. digital adversaries such as Russia and China and new cybersecurity executives with broad powers to cut through red tape at the White House and State Department. But the commission’s bold recommendations were largely lost in the shuffle two days later when President Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency and official Washington rushed to deal with the pandemic. A planned media tour by the commission’s congressional co-chairs, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), was also put on ice.

National: What’s lost, gained as Black Hat and DEF CON go virtual | Bradley Barth/SC Media

As Black Hat and DEF CON organizers, researchers and members of the cyber community scramble to figure out how they can salvage or, better yet, enhance the experience as the events go virtual amid the COVID-19 pandemic, security will be a top priority. Meanwhile, other aspects of the conferences are expected to change more drastically, for better or worse. Organizers of the August 2020 events are aware the remote shows will have to emphasize security, as the new format presents a tempting challenge to adversaries who may want to make a name for themselves by hacking into the shows’ remote infrastructure, perhaps hijacking a presentation or disrupting access. While members of the cyber community acknowledged the issue, they don’t seem to be fretting it too heavily. “Sure, there is always a concern, but if cybersecurity conferences can’t figure out how to secure their virtual events, well, they probably shouldn’t claim to be a cybersecurity conference,” said Patrick Wardle, a frequent Black Hat/DEF CON presenter, principal security researcher at Jamf, and founder of Objective-See. “And such conferences already have had to secure their websites and networks at in-person events. And oftentimes such networks were part of a public venue or… belonged to the venue itself, and thus a purely virtual event may be in a way, simpler to secure.”

National: ‘It’s Partly On Me’: GOP Official Says Fraud Warnings Hamper Vote-By-Mail Push | Pam Fessler/NPR

May 15, 2020

Republican state officials who want to expand absentee and mail-in voting during the pandemic have found themselves in an uncomfortable position due to their party’s rhetoric. President Trump has claimed repeatedly, without providing evidence, that mail-in voting is ripe for fraud and bad for the GOP. He and other Republicans have charged that Democrats might use it to “steal” the election. Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams told NPR he got his “head taken off” by some fellow Republicans for his plan to send every registered voter a postcard telling them how they can easily apply for an absentee ballot for the state’s June 23 primary. “The biggest challenge I have right now is making the concept of absentee voting less toxic for Republicans,” he said. Adams said the presumption that absentee voting is less secure is frustrating because Kentucky has safeguards in place to protect against fraud — including requiring people to apply for ballots instead of automatically sending them to everyone on the voter rolls. But Adams admitted he is partly to blame. Like many Republicans, he ran for office on a platform of fighting voter fraud. His campaign slogan was to “make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

National: Why A Voting App Won’t Solve Our Problems This November | Kaleigh Rogers/FiveThirtyEight

At 106, MacCene Grimmett is one of the oldest voters in the state of Utah. Though women didn’t have the right to vote when she was born in 1913, by the time she was of voting age, the 19th Amendment had passed. She has voted in every election since, she told her local Fox affiliate, including the Utah County municipal general election last November. But that time, the centenarian cast her ballot in a novel way: She voted via an app. America is 174 days away from a presidential election. It’s also in the middle of a pandemic that upended normal life, requiring mass shutdowns and social distancing. Those two things don’t exactly jive. Having millions of Americans stand in crowded polling places for hours to cast a ballot on Election Day sounds like the makings of a public health disaster — especially if there is a second surge of COVID-19 infections in the fall, as some experts predict. So now, election officials are looking for ways to hold elections remotely. One option that has been proposed is voting via an app on a smartphone or electronic device, just like Grimmett did last fall (though so far, states seem to only be considering this option for certain groups of voters, such as voters with disabilities).

National: Experts sound alarms about security as states eye online voting | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Experts are sounding alarms about potential security risks as several states consider allowing online voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginia are planning to allow overseas military personnel and voters with disabilities to return their ballots electronically for elections this year amid concerns about voting during a pandemic. But federal officials and cybersecurity experts are strongly urging states to stay away from online voting, arguing that it could open up new avenues for interference less than four years after Russia meddled in the 2016 elections. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) joined a group of federal agencies in condemning the idea of online voting in guidelines first reported by The Guardian last week. The guidelines, sent to states privately, described online voting as “high risk.” “Electronic ballot return, the digital return of a voted ballot by the voter, creates significant security risks to voted ballot integrity, voter privacy, ballot secrecy, and system availability,” the agencies wrote in the guidelines. “Securing the return of voted ballots via the internet while maintaining voter privacy is difficult, if not impossible, at this time.”

National: Experts say mobile voting tech isn’t the answer to COVID-19 | Alexander Culafi/TechTarget

Despite a need for alternatives to in-person voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts say mobile voting will not be ready for this year’s general election. Nearly a dozen pilot programs for mobile voting apps and internet voting portals have been launched across the U.S. in the last few years. And that was prior to the coronavirus pandemic, which postponed some state and primary elections this spring and caused concern over the safety of potentially crowded polling locations. “It’s pretty obvious that the coronavirus is making it difficult to have our standard election. That’s having an even bigger impact in urban centers where voting lines can already last for hours and be quite packed. And people are looking for other ways we can have the constitutionally mandated vote without putting people at risk,” said Jim Hendler, artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as a fellow at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

National: Republicans and Democrats barrel toward collision on voting by mail | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Americans want to be able to vote by mail in November — but Democratic proposals to require it appear to be going nowhere fast in Congress. House Democrats have sought to drastically overhaul the American electoral system in light of the pandemic, arguing dramatic change is needed to allow Americans to vote safely. In a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted last weekend, nearly three-in-five voters nationwide said they either strongly or somewhat support a federal law that would mandate that states “provide mail-in ballots to all voters for elections occurring during the coronavirus pandemic.” Just a quarter of voters either somewhat or strongly oppose the idea, with the remainder not having an opinion. However, support for the idea is split along ideological lines. A supermajority of voters who are registered or lean Democratic — 77 percent — back the idea. Republicans are more divided: 48 percent are opposed and 42 percent in favor. House Democrats have proposed mandating that states send all voters a ballot in the case of emergencies — in their most recent coronavirus relief package, dubbed the HEROES Act, along with other sweeping changes to the elections. The bill would also require universal “no-excuse” absentee voting, online and same-day voter registration and expanded early voting, among other changes.

National: Activists Vow to Protect USPS as States Expand Mail-in Voting | Gabriella Novello/WhoWhatWhy