North Carolina: Elections officials complete primary work, adjust to coronavirus | Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press

The gears of democracy are still turning in North Carolina, despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. On Friday, the State Board of Elections certified results from the state’s March 3 primary, with the exception of one county contest requiring a redo and a handful of local races facing protests or appeals. The election, which came in just under the wire before the COVID-19 pandemic hit North Carolina, was run with few bumps and no major issues, according to watchdog organizations like Democracy NC. At the start of its Friday meeting, State Board of Elections Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell used her emergency powers to postpone the state’s only runoff election by six weeks. Now, the second Republican primary for U.S. House District 11 is set for June 23. The district includes much of Western North Carolina’s rural counties, as well as the only major urban center, Asheville. Brinson Bell picked June 23 because it is outside the eight-week window recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to limit gatherings of 50 or more people to control the spread of COVID-19.

North Carolina: Two ‘Russian’ Ransomware Attacks Take Down Durham North Carolina City And County Government Systems | Davey Winder/Forbes

The same Russian ransomware that is thought to have been responsible for the City of New Orleans state of emergency last year has now struck Durham City and the County of Durham in North Carolina. As 2019 wound down to an end, the City of New Orleans was hit by a ransomware attack, thought to be attributable to Ryuk. That attack was severe enough for Mayor LaToya Cantrell to declare a state of emergency. Now the City of Durham and Durham County, in North Carolina, have had to shut down networks after being hit by the same Russian ransomware. The City of Durham and Durham County Government IT systems were subject to a successful cyber-attack late Friday evening, March 6. Malware detection systems kicked in to provide immediate notification of the attack, and networks were closed down to prevent further spread. The incident was described as a cyber malware attack, or rather “two separate attacks” at a press conference held by officials Monday, March 9. Thomas Bonfield, Durham City manager, said that while the malware had “been contained ” and the city was in recovery mode, “most city networks and phones remain intentionally offline during the initial stages of the recovery process.” Bonfield said that the National Guard cybersecurity team was helping with the recovery effort. It should be noted, however, that critical public safety systems, including access to the 911 network, remained operational thanks to the emergency cyber-attack remediation process.

North Carolina: Ransomware Attack Hits Durham North Carolina City, County Governments | Lucas Ropek/Government Technology

Hackers of “Russian” origin targeted the city and county governments of Durham, N.C., over the weekend, hampering computer and communications networks with ransomware, according to local officials. The attack, which used the infamous Ryuk malware strain typically spread through malicious attachments in phishing emails, was carried out late Friday by a Russian hacking group, according to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations, one of the agencies looking into the attack. On the heels of a year with a precipitous rise in ransomware attacks on state and local government, the incident is one of several to occur in the first few months of 2020 that show the trend does not seem to be slowing.  City and county officials confirmed during a joint press conference Monday that the malware appears to have spread after internal employees clicked on infected emails.

North Carolina: Super Tuesday vote counting problems in Warren County North Carolina | Will Doran/Raleigh News & Observer

Officials in a North Carolina county accidentally inflated the votes in one Super Tuesday primary election, but fixed the problem on Thursday. Tuesday’s election results are still unofficial everywhere in the state, and officials at the N.C. State Board of Elections will do audits all around the state regardless of whether voting results appear wrong. In one rural area, however, they have already found an issue and say it was due to human error. “It’s very important to note that the results on the election night reporting system are unofficial and this is ongoing,” Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the elections board, said in an interview Thursday morning. Warren County, a small community north of Raleigh on the Virginia border, has only 41 registered Libertarian voters. But on Tuesday the county reported more than 800 votes cast in the Libertarian presidential race.

North Carolina: How did Guilford’s new voting system work? | Taft Wireback/Greensboro News Record

The votes are in, and Guilford County’s new system of hand-marked, paper ballots came through its first, full-fledged test without any major snags. Elections Director Charlie Collicutt said the new equipment worked well in Tuesday’s primary and voters adapted successfully to the shift away from touchscreen voting to paper ballots. “There was some apprehension early in the process because it is something different from what you’ve been doing for the last 15 years,” Collicutt said Wednesday. Voters came out for Tuesday’s primary in robust, if not record numbers: 112,728 cast ballots, or about 31% of the county’s registered voters, Collicutt said. That’s 5% below turnout for the last presidential primary in 2016 when 122,897 voters participated, he said. Once voting got under way Tuesday, the only significant drawback came from delays by state government’s computer system in displaying Guilford’s results online, Collicutt said. “The big issue was how slow the state’s website was,” he said. “The upload was so slow.” Guilford County spent about $2 million for its new voting equipment to comply with changes in state law that require systems to leave a better paper trail than the touchscreen terminals Guilford had been using for years. The new system relies on printed, multiple-choice ballots that voters fill out in ink and feed into a tabulator at their precincts.

North Carolina: New Mecklenburg voting equipment ready for Super Tuesday | Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press

Elections are unpredictable. Election administration does not have to be. For example, the Bipartisan Policy Center and MIT have jointly conducted research on polling-place lines in the 2016 and 2018 elections. Their findings, which are consistent with other research, show that voters of color wait in line, on average, longer than white voters and that election jurisdictions using electronic voting machines had longer wait times than those using hand-marked paper ballots. The factors that cause long lines on election day – outside of unforeseeable problems like storms or power outages – are known weeks if not months in advance. Charles Stewart III is a professor at MIT and an expert on election administration. He has used the predictable nature of things like line length at a polling place to help counties prepare for elections. “If you know how long it takes to serve somebody, so, like how long it takes to check somebody in or how long it takes for somebody to vote, you can estimate the average wait time,” Stewart said. Rather than waiting for the election to see if there were long lines, Carolina Public Press investigated the distribution of voting equipment in Mecklenburg County to detect red flags ahead of primary election day on March 3.

North Carolina: Mecklenburg County OKs Buying New Voting Equipment | Steve Harrison/WFAE

Mecklenburg Commissioners voted 8-1 Tuesday night to buy new electronic voting equipment that it will be in place for the March 3 primary. The county is buying new machines to comply with a North Carolina law that requires paper ballots to improve election security. Many North Carolina counties are switching to paper ballots in which voters will use a pencil to fill in ovals next to their choices.Elections experts have said that such an all-paper system would provide more security. But Mecklenburg Elections director Michael Dickerson said the elections board believes that will lead to problems. “If you are filling in an oval, and you partly fill in the oval, will it count? Will it not count?” Dickerson said. “What if you fill in two ovals and circle one meaning that’s the one you want? That’s what the board did not want to do. They did not want to have to be responsible for interpreting votes for the voters.” So, the county is going with a hybrid system.

North Carolina: Ignoring Warning Signs: Officials Approve Vulnerable Voting Machines | Gabriella Novello/WhoWhatWhy

Election officials know very well that using outdated and costly touchscreen voting machines — which are susceptible to hacking and other foul play — will likely lead to programming issues and cause long lines during the 2020 election that will ultimately drive voters away from the polls. Though more states are moving toward hand-marked paper ballots, most of those ballots will still be counted by machines. In other states — some of which could play a crucial role this year — election officials have ignored calls by election security experts to steer clear of problematic touchscreen machines altogether, and are rushing to approve even more. In North Carolina, despite overwhelming opposition from voters and election security experts, the State Board of Elections (NCSBE) bypassed a certification process to approve new touchscreen voting machines by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). At the same time, it  expressed “disappointment” in the company for misleading the board about whether it could provide enough of the voting machines that were certified in August. Critics of the decision argue that election officials rushed to approve the modification request after the board was forced to consider a more expensive voting machine just one month after the initial certification in August because ES&S said that it could not supply North Carolina with all the machines the state needed.

North Carolina: Election probe finds security flaws in key North Carolina county but no signs of Russian hacking | Kim Zetter/Politico

A long-awaited report this week from the Department of Homeland Security found security problems with the computer systems that a North Carolina county used to handle voter data during the 2016 election — but no evidence that Russian hackers had breached them. Still, the review is unlikely to totally resolve questions surrounding the county’s use of software provided by the Florida company VR Systems, which — as POLITICO reported last week — have added to broader doubts about the security of election technology that Americans will use at the polls in 2020. Experts contacted by POLITICO said the new DHS analysis has its share of holes — for instance, failing to examine all the computer systems the Russians could have targeted. And they noted that officials in Durham County, N.C., had waited until about a week after Election Day to preserve some potentially important evidence. “I think [the investigation is] incomplete,” says Jake Williams a former NSA hacker who is founder of the security firm Rendition Infosec and trains forensic analysts. “It’s the best investigation that can be conducted under the circumstances. We can’t investigate what we don’t have, [and] a lot of the crucial evidence is missing.” Among other security issues, the heavily redacted DHS report indicates that someone had used a “high value” desktop computer handling Durham County’s voter-registration data to access a personal Gmail account on Election Day. The report provides a lengthy list of suggestions — all blacked out — for how the county can improve the security of its election infrastructure.

North Carolina: Federal review finds no evidence hacking caused 2016 Durham County election problems | Travis Fain/WRAL

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security review found no evidence that hacking caused the 2016 election problems that forced Durham County to shut down electronic poll books on election day, the State Board of Elections said Monday in a joint statement with Durham’s board of elections. The report, months in the making, is “compelling evidence that there were no cyberattacks impacting the 2016 election in Durham,” Durham County Board of Elections Chairman Philip Lehman said in the joint statement. The state released a heavily redacted version of the 12-page report late Monday afternoon. In it, federal cyber security experts say they “did not conclusively identify any threat actor activity,” but that aspects of the state’s election security could be improved. Most of these recommendations are redacted for security reasons, but Lehman said in his statement that the county has already “implemented additional training, security measures and staffing changes” since 2016. State elections director Karen Brinson Bell said the state is working with county boards and the federal government “to improve security at every step in the voting process.”

North Carolina: No evidence of cyber attack in Durham County 2016 election, acordind to DHS | Will Doran/Raleigh News & Observer

There’s no evidence that the 2016 Election Day problems in Durham were the result of cyber hackers, according to the federal government. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference said a company — whose description closely matched the company that provided voter check-in software for Durham and other North Carolina counties in 2016 — was targeted by hackers. And Durham experienced widely reported issues with that check-in software during the 2016 elections. State officials have long said they believed the problems were just due to human error, however, and not anything malicious like foreign hackers. But after the Mueller report’s findings on election interference became public earlier this year, officials at the Department of Homeland Security agreed to look into the Durham situation. On Monday, putting an end to their months-long investigation, they announced they had found nothing to indicate a cyber attack. Phillip Lehman, chairman of the Durham County Board of Elections, called the report “compelling evidence that there were no cyberattacks impacting the 2016 election in Durham.” “As we have acknowledged, there was human error in the preparation of electronic poll books,” Lehman said in a news release announcing the investigation’s findings. “Since that time, the Durham County Board of Elections has implemented additional training, security measures and staffing changes. Elections in 2017, 2018 and 2019 were conducted efficiently and accurately with no significant incidents.”

North Carolina: Clear Ballot giving up on North Carolina for now | Gary D. Robertson/Associated Press

A Massachusetts-based election equipment manufacturer is giving up for now on selling its machines to North Carolina counties. Clear Ballot’s chief executive told the State Board of Elections it was withdrawing its request to certify its recent product upgrades. CEO Jordan Esten’s letter last week blamed the board’s slow pace for its troubles, saying the company was unable to communicate with the state’s counties during the two-year wait for the original certification. Esten said that gave current dominant equipment manufacturer Election Systems & Software “a marketing monopoly in the state.” “We still want to work with North Carolina,” Esten wrote. “However, the environment and rules continue to stifle competition, which is regretfully causing us to withdraw our certification request at this time.”

North Carolina: Clear Ballot leaving North Carolina, seeks probe of ES&S’s practices | Frank Taylor/Carolina Public Press

Clear Ballot, one of three companies certified to provide election systems to North Carolina counties for 2020, formally withdrew from the state on Thursday, citing certification and marketing rules that Clear Ballot said perpetuate a virtual monopoly by competitor Election Systems & Software. Jordan Esten, chief executive officer of Boston-based Clear Ballot, told Carolina Public Press on Thursday that he has asked the N.C. Board of Elections to look into whether ES&S improperly capitalized on its presence in North Carolina with older generations of election equipment, marketing its elections systems to counties before the state certified it this summer. Separately, N.C. Rep. Verla Insko, D-Orange, issued a letter to the state Board of Elections calling for the board to “to delay this use of (ES&S’ systems) until after the 2020 election.” She pointed to many questions that have been raised about ES&S and its newly certified ballot-marking devices. North Carolina and Indiana are the only states that prevent elections systems makers from marketing systems prior to certification. Clear Ballot CEO Esten said he thinks this is a foolish law, but his company has followed the rule. Esten said he remains suspicious about ES&S’ compliance because many counties rapidly adopted its new electronic voting system almost immediately after it was certified. N.C. Board of Elections member Stella Anderson told CPP Thursday that she also had concerns about ES&S having an uncompetitive advantage. She observed that many counties have chosen to go with ES&S systems even though she felt its product wasn’t strong. “I haven’t met a person yet who thinks the ES&S Express Vote is good technology,” she said.

North Carolina: Elections officials anxious over software upgrade | Brooke Conrad/Carolina Journal

A voting software company the N.C. State Board of Elections certified earlier this year wants approval for a last-minute technology update. But some board members are asking whether the company, Election Systems and Security, should have been certified in the first place. In September, ES&S asked the BOE to approve changes to equipment already certified by the state. The timing of the request would require the BOE to circumvent its normal, thorough certification process. Problem was, the company told the board it didn’t have enough of the originally certified equipment to meet the state’s needs, forcing a vote. On Dec. 13, the board, in a 3-2 vote, approved the upgrade, with Democratic Chairman Damon Circosta and Republicans Kenneth Raymond and David Black voting in favor of the update. Democrats Stella Anderson and Jeff Carmon opposed the move. State Board Secretary Stella Anderson, along with several election security advocates across the state, had raised concerns about ES&S during earlier discussions about certification.   “The vendor will have done exactly what it wanted to do: put our backs up against the wall,” Anderson said during the meeting.

North Carolina: Divided elections board approves untested upgrade to voting system | Frank Taylor/Carolina Public Press

The NC Board of Elections narrowly voted Friday to allow an upgraded version of a previously approved voting system to be used in 2020 elections, following the recent revelation that the system’s manufacturer does not have an adequate supply of the version it encouraged the state to approve and test earlier this year. But the 3-2 decision did not come without criticism aimed at the company, Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software, by a bipartisan mix of board members, including from those voted both for and against allowing the Electronic Voting System 5.2.4.0 as a replacement for EVS 5.2.2.0 without requiring additional testing. “I’m disappointed,” said Board of Elections Chairman Damon Circosta, a Democrat who voted with the board’s two Republican members to allow the upgraded systems. “I’m disappointed with ES&S, who in their zeal to sell their product have lacked candor, and not been forthcoming with this agency.” Republican board member Kenneth Raymond expressed similar concerns. “During the certification process, many individuals expressed their concerns to this board about working with ES&S as a vendor, and the vendor is fully aware of that,” Raymond said. “But unfortunately, rather than take action that would mitigate those concerns, their behavior and events of the last month or so (has) only increased them.”

North Carolina: Elections board chastises voting equipment vendor | Gary D. Robertson/Associated Press

North Carolina’s election supervisors chastised the nation’s largest voting machine manufacturer on Friday for late software and supply changes involving the planned rollout in coming weeks of voting systems that were recently approved for use in 2020 elections. Still, majorities on the State Board of Elections accepted vote the software alterations and equipment tweaks by the manufacturer, Election Systems & Software. In August, the board certified some of the company’s touch-screen ballot-marking devices and tally machines so they could be sold to counties beginning with next year’s elections. The voting systems digitize a person’s choices onto a ballot with both bar code data and by names. The ballot’s bar code is then read by the company’s counting machines. The certification came as the company’s touchscreen-only equipment — used for years by about one-third of state’s voting population of nearly 7 million in about 20 counties — could no longer be used starting this month.

North Carolina: A divided North Carolina Elections Board narrowly approves newly ‘tweaked’ voting machines | Will Doran/Raleigh News & Observer

North Carolina elections officials approved a new type of touchscreen voting machine Friday over the objection of outside advocates and two elections board members who said the machines haven’t been properly tested. Election security and hacking concerns are at the center of the debate, with the 2020 election just a few months away. Federal government agencies have said foreign countries tried to interfere in the 2016 elections — including potentially in North Carolina — and will likely try to do so again next year. There are two main types of voting methods approved for the 2020 elections in North Carolina. Most counties plan to use hand-marked paper ballots. But some counties, including Mecklenburg, the state’s largest, plan to use touchscreen voting machines. Some election security advocates say touchscreen voting is more susceptible to hackers. But the state’s professional election experts have vouched for those machines, saying they’re confident in their ability to stop hackers. And in August the political leadership of the Board of Elections voted 3-2 to approve voting machines made by three different companies — ES&S, Clear Ballot and Hart InterCivic.

North Carolina: Despite ‘disappointment’ in manufacturer, election board skips certification to approve new voting systems | Benjamin Schachtman/Port City Daily

The state’s election board has resolved the potential for a major shortage of voting machines — including around $1 million worth that New Hanover County plans to order. The move was not without controversy, as some state officials said the manufacturer held back information about the shortage to force the state’s hand in approving a new model. On Friday afternoon, the North Carolina Board of Elections (NCSBE) voted 3-2 to approve the use of a newer model voting system manufactured by Elections Systems and Software (ES&S) without putting it through a state certification process. Board Chair Damon Circosta cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the approval, but expressed disappointment in ES&S behavior. “I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed with ES&S, who in their zeal to sell their product lacked candor and were not forthcoming with this agency,” Circosta said. Circosta ultimately cast the vote in favor of fast-tracking ES&S’s new system, saying “my disappointment does not dissuade me from my obligation to North Carolina voters” and noting that the system itself was in line with the board’s commitment to providing election security and transparency, despite its manufacturer’s actions. The issue stems from a 2018 North Carolina law (SL 2018-13) that decertified direct record electronic (DRE) voting systems because they did not create a physical record that could be checked in the event of election challenges, evidence of hacking, or other irregularities. New Hanover County’s Board of Elections has over 100 DRE units.

North Carolina: Bait and switch by ES&S in North Carolina? | Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press

A voting system certified and tested earlier this year for use in North Carolina’s March 2020 primaries won’t be available, according to manufacturer Elections Systems and Software, so the company’s lobbyists have suggested the state quickly approve one of its other systems instead. While the N.C. Board of Elections director has recommended going along with the vendor on the substitution, others see the move as a deceptive bait and switch. One Board of Elections member, Stella Anderson, has objected to the situation, thereby forcing the board to convene a special meeting on the issue. She and others have questioned the integrity of the company and suggested both ES&S and board staff have used language that understates the significance of the difference between the two systems and misrepresents federal government requirements for approving such modifications to voting systems. ES&S has been trying to get its EVS voting system certified in North Carolina since 2017. Litigation between the Republican legislature and the Democratic governor, the 9th Congressional District ballot fraud scandal in 2018, and the resignation of the former Board of Elections chairman delayed certification of the new system until the 11th hour.

North Carolina: Voting machine reliability brought up as concern after issues with similar machines in other state | Paige Pauroso/WBTV

The North Carolina State Board of Elections is taking a closer look at voting machines they plan on purchasing after the same company’s machines were part of an election nightmare in a county in Pennsylvania. The company ES&S makes the Express Vote XL, which was used in Pennsylvania on Election Day in November, but due to what is said to be a programming error, the votes were counted incorrectly. Now, Mecklenburg County said they will do everything they can to make sure the same problem doesn’t happen here if the county gets state approval to purchase similar voting machines made by the same company. The two voting machines are different models and work differently when a voter goes to cast a final ballot, but operate similarly when you’re marking the ballot. Mecklenburg County plans to purchase the Express Vote model instead of the Express Vote XL model. The problems voters faced in Pennsylvania are bringing up some concerns of will North Carolina have enough time to properly test the machines before they’re supposed to make their debut in 2020.

North Carolina: Election security debate affects voters with disabilities | Jordan Wilkie/Raleigh News & Observer

When Damon Circosta, chairman of the state board of elections, voted in August to certify an elections equipment system opposed by local election security advocates, he said conversations with disability rights groups helped him make that decision. Circosta, whose vote broke a 2-2 tie, was in his first meeting as board chair. Carolina Public Press first asked Circosta on Aug. 23, the date of the meeting, about which disability rights groups he had talked with in making up his mind. A response, emailed by Board of Elections public information officer Pat Gannon, did not answer CPP’s question. Neither did records requests for communications between Circosta and any disability rights group or advocate. The records showed that one person, Lawrence Carter, president of the Raleigh/Wake Council of the Blind, submitted a written statement and made public comment, but his views were in opposition to the voting system Circosta voted to certify.

North Carolina: Toss-up State to Use Vulnerable Tech in 2020 | Jack Lowenstein/WhoWhatWhy

The 2020 election is expected to once again be razor-close and, in light of Russian attempts to hack the vote in 2016, making it secure is of paramount importance. That is why North Carolina’s recent decision to open the door for unverifiable barcode election technology is raising eyebrows in the election integrity community. At the end of a 30-month process, the North Carolina State Board of Elections recently approved three new voting systems to replace decades-old technology in the state. However, state election officials also did something else: With their selection, they approved the use of barcode voting technology. Election integrity advocates, cybersecurity experts, and even two members of the five-member state board have strongly objected to the use of this technology. With the 2020 presidential election on the horizon — and North Carolina expected to be in play — the decision of state officials to choose voting systems that do not leave behind a verifiable paper trail creates major concerns for election transparency advocates.

North Carolina: State election officials stand by voting machine decisions | Travis Fain/WRAL

State Board of Elections staff on Tuesday stood by the process used to certify new election machines. For weeks, activists, reporters and board members have asked for more information about the tests run on machines that were approved in August, which was a long-awaited step required before counties could buy new machines to use in the 2020 elections. On Tuesday, Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell and key staff presented a 10-page response that boils down to this: The process laid out in state code was followed, and the systems can be used in the coming elections. The issue may still bring a lawsuit from activists who have questioned the process for more than a month as part of a broader push to require hand-written ballots in North Carolina instead of allowing touchscreen voting machines that spit out a paper ballot and record votes in a bar code. At least one board member left Tuesday’s three-hour-plus board meeting unsatisfied. “My concerns, my misgivings … largely remain,” Stella Anderson said as the meeting wrapped.

North Carolina: Did North Carolina skip a step? New voting machines questioned again | Travis Fain/WRAL

Activists and computer scientists have raised questions about the process used to certify new voting machines in North Carolina that, for weeks, the State Board of Elections hasn’t answered. The board’s chairman and its executive director say answers are coming and that staff plan to bring detailed information to the board at its meeting next Tuesday. But at least two board members, along with a string of academics and activists, are concerned that the state skipped steps as it certified three new election systems. Counties around the state are weighing whether to buy those systems to use in the 2020 elections. Frustrated by slow progress at the state level, activists worried about the security of touchscreen systems reached out to county officials responsible for picking and buying new machines, spurring an email Tuesday from the state elections director promising local officials answers next week. If the issue lingers, it may “throw chaos into the 2020 elections,” said Marilyn Marks, a Charlotte activist who founded the Coalition for Good Governance and has pushed this line of inquiry. “The lack of response to date is irresponsible, given that the questions have been swirling for at least three weeks,” Marks wrote to state board members and other election officials on Sept. 14. “Obviously, if the legally mandated certification work had been performed, documentation would have been produced weeks ago.”

North Carolina: Experts Warn of Voting Machine Vulnerabilities in North Carolina | Nancy McLaughlin/Greensboro News & Record

A hacker hired to find flaws in voting machines around the world and a computer code writer appointed by a judge to take a forensics look at a controversial election told an emergency meeting of the NAACP in Greensboro, N.C., that even the newest era voting machines are vulnerable to reprogramming. The panel of cyber experts, who were video-broadcasted into the discussion at New Light Baptist Church, took shots at bar code systems like the ones that Guilford County, N.C., is considering. “It suggests more information than is there,” said computer scientist and engineer Duncan Buell of the University of South Carolina. Buell is part of a team auditing election data in his state that has discovered problems in the process that led to uncounted votes in previous elections. The bar codes are only as good as what they are programmed to do, Buell said. Without a paper ballot showing how people voted, he said, they are unreliable even in a recount.

North Carolina: Voting equipment approval didn’t follow law | Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press

North Carolina’s recent decision to certify new voting systems for use next year did not follow state law, according to a letter that a group of experts on election security and administration sent to the N.C. Board of Elections late Wednesday night. North Carolina has been in the process of reviewing new voting systems for certification for over two years. The system that is currently in use across the state was certified in 2005. The law requires a security review of the source code of all voting systems before they are certified for use in the state. The letter states that there is no indication that the state, either through its own contractors or through required federal testing, reviewed the source code for the computers in the voting systems it recently certified. The experts in question, including Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science at the University of South Carolina, reviewed testing documentation from the state and from the federal government. “You read all of that, and it’s clear,” Buell said. “There was no source code review conducted. That would certainly seem to suggest that things are not in accordance with North Carolina law.”

North Carolina: State certifies barcode ballot voting systems despite security concerns | Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press

Amid threats of litigation from all sides, the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 3-2 Friday afternoon to certify a voting system that experts say is insecure, voting rights groups advocated against and many public comments opposed.Chairman Damon Circosta, a Democrat, in his first meeting after being appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper, voted against a motion to make voting system certification requirements more stringent. The board’s two Republican members, David Black and Kenneth Raymond, voted with Circosta.The new certification requirements, proposed by Dr. Stella Anderson and supported by fellow Democrat Jeff Carmon III, would have precluded one voting-machine vendor, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), from having its system certified.The room for Friday’s meeting was packed with voters and advocates from civil rights and voting rights organizations, such as Democracy NC, which seeks to improve voter turnout in elections.“This is disappointing,” Democracy NC executive director Tomas Lopez said. “But the decision on what ultimately gets purchased is with the counties, and with the county boards of elections in particular.” Two counties, Davie and Transylvania, submitted letters to the board asking that existing certification requirements not be changed. Both counties use voting-machine-for-all systems, using old technology that the state will decertify on Dec. 1.

North Carolina: Election officials closely watching state vote on voting systems Friday as 2019, 2020 races loom | Emily Featherston/WECT

Along with everything else it takes to prepare for the upcoming 2019 municipal elections, and the 2020 primaries close on their heels, election officials in southeastern North Carolina are also waiting to see what kind of equipment they will be able to use. On Friday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections is expected to finally make a decision that will dictate what machines voters use to cast a ballot. Most of the attention has been focused on the state’s move away from touchscreen equipment that only generates an electronic ballot, as counties across North Carolina wait to see what equipment will be approved for them to buy. New Hanover County is also waiting for the state’s stamp of approval for the replacement of its outdated voting equipment. New Hanover County last purchased ballot tabulators in 2006, explained county board of elections director Rae Hunter-Havens. Those machines typically have a lifespan of just 10 years — and they are starting to show their age. “We’ve exceeded that end-of-life projection,” Hunter-Havens said, and that means increasing mechanical issues.

North Carolina: Vote security on the line in Board of Elections meeting | Jordan Wilkie/Carolina Public Press

When the NC Board of Elections meets Friday, it will make decisions about voting equipment for 2020 elections that could determine the security of the state’s election process and how much confidence voters can have that the system records and tabulates their votes as they intended. Security experts, federal research agencies and the US Senate agree on best practices for secure election equipment. They recommend that most voters use hand-marked paper ballots, count the ballots using digital scanners and audit the paper ballots for correctness before election results are made official. Most North Carolinians already vote this way. However, 23 of the state’s 100 counties use touch screens to cast their ballots, a system that experts consider insecure and outdated because it cannot be effectively audited. For that reason, North Carolina is set to decertify those systems by Dec. 1. This week, the state board of elections will consider certifying replacement systems. The decisions the board makes will have a domino effect of consequences for the security, privacy and accessibility of elections across the state.

North Carolina: Elections board to pick chair, key decision looms | Associated Press

The North Carolina elections board has a new leader ahead of a decision on what kind of voting machines are secure against efforts to alter ballots.
The state Board of Elections voted Tuesday to make nonprofit executive Damon Circosta of Raleigh its new chairman. Gov. Roy Cooper last week picked Circosta as the Democrat to replace former chairman Bob Cordle, who resigned after telling a crude joke. Circosta was politically unaffiliated last year when he was named chairman of a different version of the elections board. He now joins two other Democrats and two Republicans. The elections board later this month is expected to decide whether the next generation of voting machines should be required to furnish a paper printout so voters can read and confirm their ballots.