The Voting News Weekly

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for September 25 – October 1 2017

In a public hearing of an election security task force, former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said that Russian probes and attempted hacks of state election systems in the last election are “a wake up call” for upcoming state and congressional elections in 2018. Johnson said that as his department initially uncovered the Russian probes he worried about the ramifications. “Last year, when we saw these voter registration databases being targeted, I was very worried it was the run-up to a huge catastrophic attack,” that would result in the deletion of voter registration information, he said. “We were very worried about that and we continue to worry about the ability of bad cyber actors to compromise voter registration data.” Johnson also suggested that Congress could institute “federal minimum standards” for cybersecurity election-related systems — though he encouraged lawmakers to tread lightly, given that states are responsible for administering elections and regard it as “their sovereign process.”

Twitter briefed staff members of the Senate and House intelligence committees for their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election amid disclosures that the social media network may have been used even more extensively than Facebook in the Russian influence campaign last year. In addition to Russia-linked Twitter accounts that posed as Americans, the platform was also used for large-scale automated messaging, using “bot” accounts to spread false stories and promote news articles about emails from Democratic operatives that had been obtained by Russian hackers.

In a CNN oped, President Obama’s ethics czar Norm Eisen suggests that election officials made a mistake in ending efforts to recount the contest in key states. “Those recounts offered the best opportunity to identify and resolve issues that are now coming to light. We should study our errors to avoid repeating them — and to make sure recounts in the future are better at detecting hacking and other threats.”

A lawsuit in federal court is challenging the Mississippi constitution’s lifetime disenfranchisement of citizens convicted of certain felonies. “Once you’ve paid your debt to society, I believe you should be allowed to participate again,” said plaintiff Kamal Karriem, a 58-year-old former Columbus city councilman who pleaded guilty to embezzlement in 2005 after being charged with stealing a city cellphone. “I don’t think it should be held against you for the rest of your life.”

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has appealed a lower court ruling that rejected the state’s policy of starting to purge the registration of voters who fail to vote over a two-year period. Organizations who challenged Ohio’s policy say targeting inactive voters for eventual registration cancellation amounts to “voter suppression” that violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

Travis County Texas has rejected proposals to build Star-Vote, a custom-designed voting system that was supposed to improve security, turning it toward more traditional methods of finding a replacement for its current system. Officials made this decision after proposals to build STAR-Vote did not meet the requirements to create a complete system that fulfills all of the county’s needs. Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir collaborated with experts to design of STAR-Vote — with the STAR standing for “Secure, Transparent, Auditable, Reliable.” It came in response to security concerns, but was supposed to also be quick, accurate and accessible for voters with disabilities. It would also create a paper trail, which could be used if a recount becomes necessary.

Election security watchdogs say they’re encouraged by Virginia’s recent decision to get rid of its paperless voting machines. Still, Susan Greenhalgh, election specialist for Verified Voting, says using paper ballots is only the first step, and that they need to be counted to detect tampering. “We need to use them to audit the election results. It’s like we can have a seatbelt in our car but unless we actually strap in, that seat belt doesn’t give us any safety,” she says.

Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani said that Kurds had voted “yes” to independence in a referendum held in defiance of the government in Baghdad and which had angered their neighbors and their U.S. allies. Gohdar Jadir Ibrahim, Director of Awrosoft Company, the website developer responsible for the Kurdistan Referendum e-voting portal, confirmed there were hacking attempts to prevent people of the Kurdistan Region in the Diaspora from voting, but that they were unsuccessful in compromising the vote.

In another independence vote, tensions were high as voters defied the Spanish government to participate in today’s referendum on Catalonian independence. The pro-sovereignty administration of Catalan president Carles Puigdemont says that as many as 5.3 million people are eligible to vote in the unilateral poll and has vowed to declare independence within 48 hours of a victory for the yes campaign.

Kenya’s main opposition coalition walked out of negotiations on how a rerun of last month’s annulled presidential election will be managed and threatened street protests, setting back preparations for the Oct. 26 ballot. The officials quit the talks because of plans by the ruling Jubilee Party to remove powers from the Independent Electoral & Boundaries Commission.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting New Weekly for September 18-24 2017

More than ten months after the election, the Department of Homeland Security notified the 21 states that it says Russian government hackers tried to breach during the 2016 election. NPR reports that State election officials have complained for months that the lack of information from the federal government was hampering their efforts to secure future elections. “We heard that feedback,” says Bob Kolasky, acting deputy undersecretary for DHS’s National Protection and Programs Directorate. “We recognize that it is important for senior state election officials to know what happens on their state systems.”

Following weeks of scrutiny surrounding Facebook’s potential role in influencing the 2016 election, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network will provide Congress the contents of 3,000 advertisements purchased by Russians during the 2016 campaign. The acknowledgment of Facebook’s possible role in affecting the elections is a major shift from the CEO’s initial statements on the subject. Zuckerberg had previously said that the idea that “fake news” on Facebook had played a role in the election of Donald Trump was “a pretty crazy idea”. Facebook’s sales teams, however, have touted the company’s ability to “significantly shift voter intent” through ads.

The Federal government’s ability to protect against future cyberattacks on election infrastructure and processes was questioned by John Allen and Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute. They endorsed a bipartisan amendment to the annual defense authorization sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that would help states block cyber-attacks, secure voter registration logs and voter data, upgrade election auditing procedures, and create secure and useful information sharing about threats.

In a Guardian oped, Andrew Gumbel warns about efforts of the Trump Administration and the President’s Election Commission to justify new barriers to voting. He observes that “[t]o counter the mainstream studies dismissing many of Kobach’s assertions, his supporters have begun generating a research trail of their own. One rightwing thinktank called the Government Accountability Institute (cofounded by Steve Bannon with money from Robert and Rebekah Mercer) recently turned to data companies using questionable fuzzy matching to postulate the existence of more than 8,000 double voters in the 2016 election. (Only a handful of instances of actual double-voting have emerged, on a statistically insignificant scale.)”

Lawmakers in Georgia have begun discussing the move to replace the state’s fleet of Diebold touchscreen voting machines. The state will conduct a pilot program in the use of paper ballots this November for a municipal election but a move to a statewide paper ballot system is not expected before 2020. The bills are expected to be signed into law, as Governor Raimondo has already voiced support for vote auditing. Championed in Rhode Island by Verified Voting, Common Cause and the ACLU risk-limiting auditshave been piloted in several states, including California and Ohio, though currently only Colorado requires them.

While appeals court judges questioned whether there’s a legitimate legal question for them to decide if Wichita State University statistician Beth Clarkson is allowed to use audit tapes to test the accuracy of voting machines, the case could lead to an effort to change state law to make it easier for citizens to do accuracy tests on election equipment. Clarkson is asking the judges to order a recount of votes on ballot questions in the 2014 election, using the paper tapes generated by the county’s ES&S iVotronics as voters cast their ballots.

The Rhode Island General Assembly has approved a bill requiring the State Board of Elections to conduct post-election risk-limiting audits to ensure that equipment and procedures used to count votes are working properly. With the a Supreme Court case challenging Wisconsin redistricting to be argued next month, Robert Barnes examined how congressional districts are drawn in the state. As Barnes notes “extraordinary developments in Wisconsin have given the public an inside look at what usually is a top-secret process — and confirmation of the adage that in redistricting, legislators choose their constituents, not the other way around.”

The Supreme Court of Estonia rejected the appeal of the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) of the National Electoral Committee’s Sept. 6 decision not to ban electronic voting at the local government council elections taking place next month. The court explained that while the National Electoral Committee has the right not to start electronic voting if the security or reliability of the electronic voting system cannot be ensured, it is not, however, required to cancel e-voting if it receives information indicating the possibility of adverse consequences.

As German voters head to the polls today, the Russian internet trolls who spread distorted and falsified information before earlier elections in the US, France and elsewhere have failed to have much effect and the websites of the campaigns and major news media outlets are operating like normal. The New York Times reported on the (thusfar) absent cyberattack on the German parliamentary election.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for September 11-17 2017

There was plenty of controversy surrounding the meeting of President Trump’s “election integrity” commission over an unfounded assertion by vice chairman Kris Kobach that the result of New Hampshire’s Senate election last year “likely” changed because of voter fraud. E,J. Donne examined Kobach’s claims in a Washington Post oped. But the real event was the panel of cybersecurity experts Andrew Appel, Ron Rivest and Harri Hursti. The trio presented a powerful case for voter marked paper ballots, risk-limiting post election audits and best practices in cyber hygiene.

Appel, a professor at Princeton University, said it would be easy to write a program that cheats on election results and deletes evidence of the hack as soon as the results are reported and all the experts observed that hackers likely would leave fingerprints only if they wanted to be spotted and hurt confidence in the U.S. electoral system. “To ignore the fact that the computers are completely hackable and to try to run elections, as some states do, where they entirely rely on the word of a computer program on who won is entirely irresponsible,” Mr. Appel said. A video of the entire hearing can be viewed here, with the cybersecurity panel beginning around 6:30.

A bipartisan amendment to the annual defense authorization measure aimed at enhancing election security is being offered by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. Among the possible uses of grant funds to states authorized under the amendment would include paper ballot voting systems and post-election audits.

Lost amid the news of the Equifax breach, security researchers at the Kromtech Security Research Center found an unsecured database containing records on all 593,328 registered voter in the state of Alaska. The records were stored in a misconfigured CouchDB database, which was accessible to anyone with a web browser — no password needed — until Monday when the data was secured and subsequently pulled offline.

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann announced that he had ordered the removal of Kaspersky antivirus software that was being used in three counties after hearing concerns over the company’s possible ties to the Russian government. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported on intelligence agencies efforts to determine whether Kaspersky’s software could contain back doors that would allow access to computers. This week acting secretary of Homeland Security Elaine C. Duke ordered federal agencies to develop plans to remove Kaspersky software from government systems in the next 90 days.

A New Hampshire judge has allowed the state to use new voting registration forms and impose new tightened ID requirements as called for in a law passed earlier this year, but blocked the penalties called for in the law from taking effect. The ruling set the stage for a deep review that is expected to take many months to resolve. Legislators on both sides of the aisle praised the decision, which will allow more time to sort out controversial issues surrounding residency requirements.

The Rhode Island House of Representatives is expected to take up a bill next week that would allow the state Board of Elections to perform post election risk limiting audits of paper ballots as a way to ensure voting machines have not been hacked. The bill that was moved out of committee and sent to the floor where it is expected to pass next week. Rhode Island Governor Raimondo is on the record as supporting the legislation. 

Inexplicably, though American astronauts in space have a special procedure allowing them to vote and American citizens living abroad can vote absentee, over five million residents of U.S. territories currently cannot vote for president and have no voting representation in Congress. Six former Illinois residents living in these territories filed suit over this allegedly arbitrary distinction between the territories, seeking the right to cast absentee ballots in their former state. The Trump Administration Justice Department opposes the lawsuit and is predictably arguing for even greater restrictions on voting rights in the territories.

The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) has submitted an appeal to Estonia’s National Electoral Committee challenging the committee’s decision to allow e-voting in the local elections this October despite a detected security risk that could affect 750,000 ID cards. In a press release the party noted “that nobody can ensure that manipulation will not take place, especially now, when information about the security risk with substantial explanations has spread across the world.”

A pro-democracy start-up led by a former municipal representative and a former operative for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, has developed an app that significantly reduces the notorious bureaucracy involved in running for local office in Russia. The program called MunDep (for Municipal Deputy) is credited with contributing the unexpected strong showing of anti-Putin candidates in Moscow during elections last weekend.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for September 4-10 2017

In a welcome development, the Virginia State Board of Elections has decertifying all remain direct recording electronic voting systems in the state effective immediately. This leave 22 localities rushing to replace their equipment before November’s gubernatorial record. Virginia had already begun to phase DREs and had decertified the AVS WinVote in 2015.

According to an extensive Politico article, the U.S. needs hundreds of millions of dollars to protect future elections from hackers — but neither the states nor Congress is rushing to fill the gap. Instead, a nation still squabbling over the role Russian cyberattacks played in the 2016 presidential campaign is fractured about how to pay for the steps needed to prevent repeats in 2018 and 2020, according to interviews with dozens of state election officials, federal lawmakers, current and former Department of Homeland Security staffers and leading election security experts.

A study headed by Harvard Professor of Government and Technology in Residence Latanya Sweeney shows how online attackers may be able to purchase – for as little as a few thousand dollars – enough personal information to potentially alter voter registration information in as many as 35 states and the District of Columbia.

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff wrote a Washington Post oped on election cybersecurity that advocated a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would limit access to election systems to qualified vendors, secure voter registration logs, help ensure proper audits of elections, create more-secure information sharing about threats, and establish proper standards for transparency.a federal judge has sent two lawsuits challenging the state’s controversial new Republican-backed law tightening voter registration requirements back to the state Superior Court, where the claims were initially filed.

Facebook is facing intense political fallout and thorny legal questions a day after confirming that Russian funds paid for advertising on the social media platform aimed at influencing voters during last year’s presidential election. The New York Times looked at some of the fake Americans created to influence the US election.

In what is likely the first step toward a statewide switch to a new voting system, Georgia will pilot the use of paper ballots this November in a local municipal election. The state last overhauled its system in 2002, at a cost of at least $54 million, when it committed to Diebold touch-screen direct-recording electronic voting machines, or DREs, that were still in use for the controversial 6th special election earlier this year.

A federal judge has sent two lawsuits challenging the New Hampshire’s controversial new Republican-backed law tightening voter registration requirements back to the state Superior Court, where the claims were initially filed.

A week after a federal court ruled the Texas needed to redraw their congressional maps before the 2018 midterms, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito temporarily blocked the ruling. The developments put Texas in a court-ordered holding pattern on voting laws and districts, forcing political candidates to wait before filing paperwork and launching campaigns and laving voters uncertain about where they can vote, who they’re voting for and what documents they’ll need, if any, to cast a ballot.

An international team of researchers has informed the Estonian authorities of a vulnerability potentially affecting digital use of Estonian ID cards issued since October 2014; all the cards issued to e-residents are also affected. The news caused some Estonian politicians to call for a postponement of upcoming local elections, due to take place on 16 October. In Estonia, approximately 35% of the voters use digital identity to vote online.

Hackers from the Chaos Computer Club have revealed that Germany’s election results are vulnerable due to poorly protected software using an older encryption method with a single secret key, rather than newer and more-secure “asymmetrical” combinations. Germans vote on paper ballots, which are hand counted at the polling place on election night but the results are aggregated electronically, including with a software called PC-Wahl that can be manipulated.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for August 28 – September 3 2017

The New York Times published an extensive article focusing on problems on Election Day 2016 in Durham County North Carolina, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before. “It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,”Verified Voting Election Specialist Susan Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham.

In a Times companion story, researcher Nicole Perlroth describes how she and her colleaguesMichael Wines, Matthew Rosenberg attempted to find out how government officials so quickly determined that, while attempts had been made to penetrate US elections systems, no actual vote totals were affected and all hacking attempts failed to influence the results. Typically a significant breach like those experienced in 2016 would be followed by deep and lengthy digital forensics analysis before any conclusions would be accepted but in this case, almost immediately, “government officials, the Clinton campaign, intelligence analysts, and civic and legal groups all appeared to calmly accept claims that votes had not been hacked.” However, as the researchers dug more deeply they discovered that “[t[he more places we looked, the worse things looked.”

In South Carolina, state officials assurance that despite millions of cyber attempts to gain access to the state voter registration system in the past year, none has succeeded has faced challenges from experts. University of South Carolina computer science professor and elections analyst Duncan Buell is not convinced by the highly-redacted report released by the state election commission. An earlier assessment revealed that every county regularly transfers election data without using secure communications channels, not encrypting information or reusing flash drives. “That’s the most damaging,” Buell said. “That’s the software that actually counts the votes at the end of the day.”

Taking Colorado’s plan for risk-limiting audits as a starting point, Madelyn Bacon at TechTarget made the case for universal routine post-election audits as essential to confidence in the accuracy of election results. She reviews some historical elections that have relied on recounts to confirm outcomes and emphasizes the importance of voter-marked paper ballots as a fundamental requirement for trustworthy elections.

Facing aging Diebold voting equipment and budget deficits, Alaska is weighing options for future elections in the State. In addition to considering various options for replacement equipment, election officials are also discussing the possibility of all mail ballot elections like those in Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Georgia is also considering new voting equipment after security breaches led to lawsuits challenging the result of a closely-watched special election. Polling places in the state have exclusively used Diebold touchscreen DREs since 2002, but election officials are considering the ES&S ExpressVote/DS200 paper ballot system for the future.

The North Carolina General Assembly approved new House and Senate maps for review by the judges who struck down the current maps. With little incentive to diminish their hols on legislative power, the Republican-led effort has faced sustained criticism for voting advocates and Democrats. Rep. Deb Butler, a Democrat from Wilmington, said the new maps are so unfair to Democrats that it would be as if a baseball team had to start every game down 6-0 and forced to bat with their non-dominant hands. Meanwhile, responding to an appeal from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the US Supreme Court put a temporary hold on a unanimous lower court ruling that nine Texas legislative districts needed to be redrawn because lawmakers intentionally discriminated against minorities in drawing them.

Opposition parties in Angola have rejected provisional results from an Aug. 23 election that gave the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola a majority of votes. The official results of the election, which International observers described the election as reasonably free and fair the ruling MPLA party won just over 61 percent of the votes cast. But the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) has accused the government of manipulating the vote, for example by depriving opposition groups of media access.

After a stunning decision that found that last month’s re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta was tainted by irregularities, the Kenyan Supreme Court nullified the election and ordered a new vote to be held within 60 days. The judges said: “[The election commission] failed, neglected or refused to conduct the presidential election in a manner consistent with the dictates of the constitution.” They did not place blame on Kenyatta or his party.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for August 21-27 2017

An NBC News investigation revealed that election officials in the most heavily populated counties of three crucial swing states – Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan – still haven’t received formal training on how to detect and fight attacks. Election security experts stress the importance of training local election officials on how to avoid cybersecurity risks noting…

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for August 14-20 2017

The security news site The Parallax posted an in depth examination of the security challenges facing US elections. Addressing the types of vulnerabilities hackers uncovered at DefCon—and plugging related holes across the United States’ election systems—would require a far more complex process than patching outdated software. It would also require years of concentrated work.

The New York Times ran a front page story on an anonymous Ukrainian hacker, who apparently wrote a program that American intelligence agencies publicly identified as one tool used in Russian hacking in the United States. Ukrainian police say that”Profexer”, as he is called, turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I. While there is no evidence that he worked for Russia’s intelligence services, it would appear that his malware apparently did.

The editorial board of the Washington Post argues that protecting voting rights is the foremost civil rights issue of our time. “The events in Charlottesville and the president’s apologia for the right-wing extremists there should mobilize anyone passionate about civil rights. There would be no better target for their energies than the clear and present danger to the most fundamental right in any democracy: the vote.”

The ruling by the 3rd District Court of Appeals has temporarily blocked a California law that would delay a recall election targeting a Democratic senator. While the court did not rule on the legality of the changes, they did rule that the law cannot be enforced while the court considers arguments from lawyers for all sides.

A lawsuit seeking to invalidate the results the special election run-off in Georgia’s 6th district has left thousands of Diebold touchscreen voting machines off-limits for future elections. This has created concerns for Atlanta officials who say they could be short of spare machines to run municipal elections in November.

Voter registration data belonging to the entirety of Chicago’s electoral roll—1.8 million records—was found last week in an Amazon Web Services bucket configured for public access. ES&S confirmed in a statement that the copy of the backup file, a .bak or Microsoft SQL backup file, contained 1.8 million names, addresses, dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers and in some cases, driver’s license and state identification numbers. In addition to the voter information, the bucket included some information on ES&S security procedures that included the hashed email passwords of ES&S employees.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill has intervened in a lawsuit filed earlier this year by a civic group that alleges discrimination in access to early voting. Hill cited a 2001 statute that requires a unanimous vote of a three-member board — comprising of a Democrat, a Republican and the county clerk — to expand early voting. Earlier this month, an Indianapolis Star investigation showed how the law has been used by state and local Republicans to restrict early voting in predominantly Democratic areas while expanding voting access in Republican-held areas.

Federal judges invalidated two Texas congressional districts approved by state Republican lawmakers, ruling that they illegally discriminate against Hispanic and black voters. But it appears that the Governor has no plans to devote time to redistricting in a special session the legislature. On Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to keep the boundaries intact for the 2018 elections.

Over the past month, five members of Australia’s 226-member parliament have admitted that they may have unwittingly held dual citizenship — a condition that, under Australia’s 1900 constitution, disqualifies them from political office in Canberra. The latest blow on Monday ensnared Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, putting into jeopardy the government’s one-seat majority in the governing House of Representatives. Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, accused New Zealand’s opposition party of colluding with the Australian Labor party in an attempt “to try and bring down the government”.

Ignoring calls by some election observers for him to concede, Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga has said he will go to court over last week’s presidential election results. Odinga said he he was challenging the results in the Supreme Court, not in the hopes of overturning the outcome but as a way to expose evidence of widespread vote-rigging.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for August 7-13 2017

Writing in the New York Review of Books Daily, Sue Halpern points out that the hacking of voting machines at this year’s Defcon convention should come as no surprise. “Since computerized voting was introduced more than two decades ago, it has been shown again and again to have significant vulnerabilities that put a central tenet of American democracy—free and fair elections—at risk.” Her extensive examination of the background of electronic voting in the US comes to the conclusion that we should be voting on paper ballots and performing rountine post-election audits to verify the accuracy of election results.

A group of advocates including representatives of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters has called on the Delaware Elections Director to expedite the process of replacing the state’s aging voting equipment. First deployed in 1996, Delaware’s 1,600 Danaher Shouptronic 1242 voting machines are among the oldest in the nation and have outlived their expected lifespan, creating a growing list of potential problems. The computer operating system used to create electronic ballots, for instance, is no longer supported by Microsoft, meaning security updates are no longer available. Delay in the report of a state task force created last year to study the issue could push replacement back from 2018 to 2020.

An investigation by the Indianapolis Star suggests that state and local Republican election officials have expanded early voting in GOP-dominated areas and restricted it in Democratic areas. Democrats are challenging the state’s early voting system in a lawsuit alleging the secretary of state and legislative supermajority have launched a concerted effort to suppress the Democratic vote, a debate that is also playing out on the national front.

Facing a deadline for re-drawing 28 legislative districts found to be unconstitutional last year, North Carolina Republican legislators adopted rules for drawing new district lines. Federal courts found that the current lines were drawn in a way to unfairly disenfranchise black voters. As the News & Observer notes “[w]hile racial gerrymandering is illegal, the U.S. Supreme Court has so far allowed political gerrymandering, and one of the new rules is that legislators may consider past election results when drawing the new lines.” The Republicans insist that they are not including race as a factors in the new redistricting effort. Democrats were incredulous. Quoted on WRAL Rep. Mickey Michaux asked “[d]o you understand that, by not using race, you’re defeating your own purpose? The districts were declared unconstitutional because of race. If you don’t use race to correct it, how are you going to show the court that they’re not still unconstitutional?”

The question of partisan gerrymandering is at the heart of a Supreme Court case to be heard this Fall that challenges the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. A federal court struck down the plan last year, concluding that it violated the Constitution because it was the product of partisan gerrymandering – that is, the practice of purposely drawing district lines to favor one party and put another at a disadvantage. This week Texas joined 15 other states in supporting Wisconsin in a high-profile Supreme Court case that chllenges limits on state lawmakers in drawing political maps to advantage one party.

In a closely watched voting case in Ohio, the Justice Department has reversed its previous position to side with the state in allowing the purging of voters from the rolls for not answering election mail and not voting in recent elections. Justice attorneys took the opposite position from the Obama administration in a case that involved the state’s removal of thousands of inactive voters from the Ohio voting rolls. In New Zealand as many as 60,000 voters may be scrubbed from the rolls ahead of next month’s general election for failing to respond to a similar mailing.

In a party-line vote, the Texas House approved a bill that would increase penalties for mail-in election crimes that included an amendment that would repeal a recently signed overhaul of rules for absentee balloting at nursing homes. A bill with rare bi-partisan support, the nursing home bill was an attempt to simultaneously remove opportunities to commit ballot fraud while expanding ballot access to nursing home residents. Supporters of the nursing home bill suspect that it was precisely the bi-partisan support that led to the effort to repeal.

Widespread protests have led to dozens of deaths after Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga claimed that results from last weeks elections had been manipulated to allow victory for the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta. Odinga claimed hackers broke into election commission computer systems and databases overnight to “create errors”. International election observers as well as delegations from the EU, the African Union and the US have urged politicians defeated in Kenya’s fiercely contested polls to concede gracefully without taking their struggle to the streets.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for July 31 – August 6 2017

There were numerous article reporting on the Voting Machine Village at last weekend’s Def Con hacking convention posted at WIRED, Tech Target, IEEE Spectrum and elsewhere. The event proved to be significant in many ways. As Hacking Village co-ordinator and security expert Harri Hursti noted “These people who hacked the e-poll book system, when they came in the door they didn’t even know such a machine exists. They had no prior knowledge, so they started completely from scratch.” Nevertheless they were able to hack all the voting machines, leading Jake Braun, one of the convention organizers to observe “Anyone who says they’re un-hackable is either a fool or a liar.”

The conference organizers did not restrict the electoral hacking demonstration to voting machines. As reported in Mother Jones, voter registration database was also attacked, and defended, which experts say is just as worrisome. Hursti commented “[i]f you look at all of the reports about foreign actors, malicious actors attacking US election infrastructure in the last election, they were not attacking the election machines, they were attacking the back-end network, the underlying infrastructure.”

While examining an ExpressPoll 5000 electronic pollbook that had been purchased on eBay, hackers discovered the personal records of 654,517 people who voted in Shelby Country, Tennessee. The information included not just name, address, and birthday, but also political party, whether they voted absentee, and whether they were asked to provide identification. Verified Voting President Barbara Simons noted that there’s no formal auditing process for how many of the machines are properly wiped, and thus no way to estimate how many machines have been sold that inadvertently contain voter records. The fact that one of e-pollbooks at DEF CON had personal records that were so easily available doesn’t inspire confidence, said Matt Blaze, a renowned security researcher who has authored several studies on voting machine security and who helped organize the village. “How many other of these machines that also have data left on them have been sold to who knows who? There’s no way of knowing,”

The New York Times observed that the DEF CON exploits demonstrated once again that the best defence against hackers is more hackers. However, legal restrictions often hamper government cybersecurity efforts. According to a 2015 analysis, more than 209,000 cybersecurity jobs in the United States currently sit unfilled. As the Times noted “[p]artly, that’s because private sector jobs tend to pay more. But it’s also because the government can be an inhospitable place for a hacker. Talented hackers can be disqualified for government jobs by strict background checks, and dissuaded by hiring processes that favor candidates with more formal credentials.”

A US district court judge declined to temporarily bar President Trump’s voting commission from collecting voter data from states and the District, saying a federal appeals court likely will be deciding the legality of the request. Theongoing lawsuit was joined by three others this week. As with the lawsuits against Trump’s travel bans, the challengers are using Trump’s own words and tweets to fight his administration’s actions, saying the commission was created to back up a spurious theory in the first place — that voter fraud is a massive problem in the US. Menawhile, the commission’s co-chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach lost a bid to avoid testifying under oath about his plans to change U.S. election law.

Four days after a panel of three federal judges issued an order calling for new redistricting maps by Sept. 1, North Carolina Republicans began to release details of their schedule for drawing new boundaries to correct legislative districts the court found unconstitutional. The General Assembly is tentatively set to vote on new maps on Aug. 24 or 25.

The Texas-based voting systems manufacturer Hart Intercivic filed suit in district court seeking to block the Texas Secretary of State from certifying rival machine makers whose devices produce a paper receipt of votes cast. The court filings are not yet publicly available but Hart’s argument appears to hinge on the state’s requirement that counties wishing to offer multi-precinct vote centers rather than traditional precinct-specific polling place must use direct recording electronic voting machines (DREs). While the market for DREs has essentially disappeared over the past decade, Hart has developed a new DRE as part of its Verity Suite, apparently specifically for the Texas market (though there are reports of the DRE being offered to Pennsylvania counties as well. Unlike Hart’s widely used eSlate, the new DRE apparenly cannot be equipped with a voter verifiable paper audit trail printer.

The Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission will review the Department of Elections after a series of technical problems that have raised questions about the reliability of the software that powers the state’s voter registration database. VERIS, the registration database has been criticized by users and has presented technical difficulties for registrars.

To the surprise of no one, Rwanda’s controversial President Paul Kagame has won a landslide victory and secured a third term in office and extending his 17 years in power. The election came after a constitutional amendment, reportedly approved by 98% of voters, which ended a two-term limit for presidents and theoretically permits Kagame to remain in power until 2034. In subsequent presidential election, the National Election Commission announced that Kagame won almost 99% of votes cast.

The voting system manufacturer Smartmatic announced that turnout figures in Venezuela’s Constitutional Assembly election were manipulated up by least 1 million votes. The London-based company has provided voting equipment for Venezuela since 2004. In a London news conference, Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica said “We know, without any doubt, that the turnout of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was manipulated.”

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for July 24-30 2017

On Friday, the 25-year-old Def Con conference’s first “hacker voting village” opened with an invitation to hackers break into voting machines and voter databases. Within 90 minutes, the first vulnerabilities began to be exposed, revealing an embarrassing low level of security. Co-organizer Matt Blaze told Forbes Magazine “[o]ne of the things we want to drive home is that these things are ultimately software-based systems and we know software-based systems have vulnerabilities, that just comes with the territory.” Blaze has previously highlighted serious weaknesses in machines. We want to make the problems public, so they can be fixed, so the public will know what the problems are and will be able to demand their systems be improved. Anything that helps informs the public qualifies as good faith here.”

The Los Angeles Times published an in-depth report on the state of voting system security across the country. The article obseves that more than 40 states use voting systems that date back to the modernization push following the 2000 presidential election debacle. The vulnerabilities of the dated equipment are chilling, according to J. Alex Halderman, director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan. “As a technical matter, it is certainly possible votes could be changed and an election outcome in a close election could be flipped,” he said, explaining that even voting equipment disconnected from the Internet can be corrupted by compromised software that is ultimately distributed to elections officials online. “The technical ability is there and we wouldn’t be able to catch it. The state of technical defense is very primitive in our election system now.”

Commenting on the first public meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity Michael Halpern and Michael Latner noted “[t]he most remarkable thing about the first meeting is not who was there and what was said, but rather who was not there and what was not said.” The lacks election scientists who could most effectively evaluate data on elections and voter fraud: election scientists, and instead is packed with with attorneys like J. Christian Adams, Hans von Spakovsky, and Christy McCormick, all of whom have specialized in bringing unsupported allegations of voter fraud, and are outspoken advocates for more restrictive voter eligibility requirements.

The Campaign Legal Center sparred in federal court with lawyers for the State of Alabama over issues related to the state’s felony disenfranchisement law. The voting rights advocacy group seeks to force the state to take steps to educate thousands of convicted felons that they may be eligible to vote under a new state law.

U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson rejected Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s request that she overturn a $1,000 fine levied on him by a U.S. magistrate judge. In upholding the original finding, Robinson became the second federal judge to deem Kobach at the very least misleading in his court appearances. Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, continued that “these examples… demonstrate a pattern, which gives further credence to Judge O’Hara’s conclusion that a sanctions award is necessary to deter defense counsel in this case from misleading the Court about the facts and record in the future.”

Two federal judges told lawyers for the North Carolina legislature that they are concerned that legislative leaders have taken few if any steps to draw new election maps since they were struck down last year. U.S District Judge Catherine Eagles asked, “You don’t seem serious. What’s our assurance that you are serious about remedying this?” The legislative leaders have argued that they need until November to draw new maps for use in the next regular election in the fall of 2018. Plaintiffs including voters and civil rights groups, however, say the maps must be redrawn immediately and that a special election should be held before the legislature convenes its next regular work session in May 2018.

In a response to voting irregularities in Dallas County, the Texas Senate approved a bill Wednesday that would increase penalties on mail-in ballot fraud. Several Democrats said they initially planned to back it, but they voted against the proposal due to a section that appeared to criminalize certain political discussions between family members “in the presence of” a mail-in ballot. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Kelly Hancock confirmed the fraud definition would apply to voters filling out ballots at home, the same as it would for voters being influenced at the polls.

In a closely watched court challenge, lawyers defending Wisconsin’s 2011 redistricting plan filed their opening brief with the U.S. Supreme Court. The plaintiffs argue that the 2011 plan was designed to heavily favor Republican candidates in state legislative races, giving them a built-in advantage to retain a large majority of seats in Wisconsin’s legislative houses, despite statewide vote totals in presidential races that typically split nearly evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for July 17-23 2017

Facing at least seven legal challenges, the President’s voter fraud commission held it’s first public meeting this week. The commission is widely recognized as a forum set up to validate the President’s unsubstantiated claims that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election. The most recent lawsuits comes from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, alleging among other things that with Trump’s creation of the commission by executive order in May, he “appointed a commission stacked with biased members to undertake an investigation into unfounded allegations of voter fraud.” The complaint also points to the “virulently racist rhetoric” of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group associated with two of the commission’s members, Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams.

The New York Times Editorial Board warned that the commission’s efforts to disenfranchise citizens has been reinforced by the significantly more powerful Justice Department, which sent a letter to 44 states demanding extensive information on how they keep their voter rolls up-to-date. As the Times notes “[t]he letter doesn’t ask whether states are complying with the parts of the law that expand opportunities to register. Instead it focuses on the sections related to maintaining the lists. That’s a prelude to voter purging.”

A single member of the commission Judge Alan King of Jefferson County, Alabama, observed that he’d never seen a single instance of voter fraud in all his years as an election official and instead emphasized the issue of outdated voting technology. As quoted in WIRED, King remarked “[t]hese voting machines are outdated. There’s no money there. Counties don’t have money. States don’t have money. We need money,” King said. “We can discuss a lot of things about voting, but … unless the technology is keeping up with voting, then we’re not using our time very wisely in my opinion.” In a USA Today editorial Jason Smith highlighted the vulnerability of the America’s aging and outdated voting equipment and insecure election infrastructure.

The state of Colorado announced that election security firm Free & Fair will design auditing software to help ensure that electronic vote tallies are accurate. The software will allow state and local election officials to conduct “risk-limiting audits,” a method that checks election outcomes by comparing a random sample of paper ballots to the accompanying digital versions.

In the waning days of the legislative session, a Maine lawmaker has introduced a bill that would allow ranked-choice voting for party primaries only. Over 51% of voters last November approved a ballot initiative calling for ranked choice voting in all elections. Earlier this year the state Supreme Court ruled that the initiative was unconstitutional but an effort to repeal the law in its entirety failed last month.

The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed to take up a case filed by Governor Roy Cooper, challenging a law adopted by the General Assembly this spring calling for the merger of the state Board of Elections and the state Ethics Commission. The court froze any further action on the merger pending the outcome of the Governor’s lawsuit, leaving the state’s election process in an ambiguous state ahead of municipal elections this Fall.

In a post-election report, the South Carolina Election Commission disclosed that on election day 2016, its firewalls blocked nearly 150,000 attempts to access the state’s voter registration database. According to the report it is likely that most of the hacking attempts came from automated computer bots.

In a striking contrast to the previous Administration’s actions, the current Justice Department filed a brief that argues Texas should be allowed to fix its voter ID rules without federal intervention or oversight. The filing also argues that the courts should simply trust Texas to educate voters on the voter ID law, despite widespread criticism of Texas’ voter education efforts ahead of the 2016 election.

The Moldovan parliament’s electoral overhaul, including a move to a first-past-the-post system has been met with strong opposition. Opponents say the new system would disadvantage smaller parties and benefit the two main political players.

The leader of Papua New Guinea’s National Party has accused the electoral commissioner of election fraud. They accuse the Electoral Commission of creating nearly 300,000 ‘ghost voters‘ in electorates controlled by the ruling party, allowing for double voting and ballot fraud.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for July 10-16 2017

Despite widespread concern about the security of the election process in America, it is nevertheless difficult to reach a consensus on how to address those concerns. In a WIRED article, Lily Hay Newman explored the complex net of intrelated stakeholders – voting officials, cybersecurity experts, national security agencies – that collectively must secure the integrity of future elections. And those upcoming election are certainly under threat as described from different perspectives in editorials by Joseph O’Neill and Richard Hasen. 

The Administration’s controversial Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is facing three new lawsuits. In separate court actions Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the American Civil Liberties Union accuse the commission of violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which sets standards for openness and accountability by such committees. A third suit, by the advocacy group Public Citizen, argues that the commission is violating the federal Privacy Act by designating the Army to collect data on voters’ registrations and voting histories and other identifying data, including partial Social Security numbers and birthdates. A similar suit, filed a week ago by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the commission’s request violated the 2002 E-Government Act.

Free & Fair,  has announced that they have been chosen to build a risk-limiting audit (RLA) system for the State of Colorado. Set to be used beginning with the November 2017 general election, this will be the first time in the United States that risk-limiting audits will be conducted on a regular, statewide basis. RLAs promote evidence-based confidence in election outcomes by comparing a random sampling of paper ballots to their corresponding digital versions.

Georgia has decided to move all its elections work in-house after a series of security lapses forced it to step away from its longtime relationship with the beleaguered elections center at Kennesaw State University. The move follows a reports of cyberattacks that the Center failed to report in a timely manner. In a related and welcome development, Georgia lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed on social media to work together on a voting system update.

Civil rights groups and minority lawmakers opened a redistricting trial arguing that the GOP-controlled Legislature illegally diluted the minority vote when it adopted temporary, court-ordered maps in 2013. Eight months ahead of the 2018 primaries, the trial is only the latest round in a long-running Texas saga over gerrymandering and race.

Wisconsin’s legislature is preparing to vote on a pair of bills that would enact stricter standards for election recounts. The impetus for this legislation was Green Party nominee Jill Stein’s successful recount petition after her distant finish in last year’s presidential election. The effect of the new provisions will make it even more difficult to get a recount.

Amid fears of vote rigging and violence, Kenyans will elect a president, a parliament and local politicians next month. A recent court decision to nullify the tender to print ballot papers, which had been awarded to a Dubai-based firm, has heightened tensions with the opposition claiming corruption and the preparation for the election cast in doubt.

International election observers have said problems with the electoral roll in Papua New Guinea that prevented thousands of people from voting are “widespread”. In its interim statement, the Commonwealth Observer Group called for an urgent review after the election to improve the accuracy of the roll.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for July 3-9 2017

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to block a request controversial request for voter information made by a commission President Donald Trump says will root out voter fraud. EPIC said “that the Commission’s demand for detailed voter histories violated the Constitutional right to privacy,” and “by seeking to assemble an unnecessary and excessive federal database of sensitive voter data from state records systems, (the commission) violated the informational privacy rights of millions of Americans.”

In a Washington Post oped, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff raised concern about security issues posed by the Trump commission request for voter data. Echoing the recommendation of computer security experts, a New York Times editorial calls for regular threat assessments of voter registration systems, the replacement paperless electronic voting machines, and routine post-election audits.

Several Georgia voters together with the Coalition for Good Governance have filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the results of last month’s 6th Congressional District special election and scrap the state’s voting system. The plaintiffs allege that state and local election officials ignored warnings for months that Georgia’s centralized election system — already known for potential security flaws and lacking a paper trail to verify results — had been compromised and left unprotected from intruders since at least last summer.

A Massachusetts lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of he state’s requirement that eligible voters register at least 20 days ahead of an election was heard in court this week. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the requirement is arbitrary and unconstitutional and disproportionately affects low-income people, elderly people, students, younger people and people of color. The lawsuit notes that15 states, including more than half of New England states, currently allow same-day registration for voters on Election Day.

North Carolina lawmakers say they might have to change 116 of the state’s 170 state legislative districts to correct the illegal racially gerrymandered districts used to elect General Assembly members for the past six years. The private attorneys representing the legislators who were sued over the 2011 district lines offered that detail in federal court documents this week as one reason for opposing special elections this year.

The Justice Department submitted a brief in support of the Texas’s voter ID legislation, which is currently facing a challenge in US District Court that claims the law discriminates on the grounds of race. Under former President Barack Obama, the Justice Department was a party in the lawsuit against the bill and filed key briefs on behalf of the plaintiffs. The department argued then that the law not only had a discriminatory effect, but that its passage after Texas state lawmakers scrutinized racial differences in access to identification also constituted a discriminatory intent.

The Indian Election Commission has decided to conduct post-election audits for all state and federal elections, in which voter verifiable paper audit records will be hand counts in 5% of polling stations in each assembly seat will be compared to electronically-generated totals. While welcoming the Election Commission’s decision, Aam Aadmi Party leader Saurabh Bhardwaj said that increasing the percentage to 25 would enhance public trust in electronic voting machines.

Counting is under way in Papua New Guinea’s sprawling elections but voting has been marred by claims of rigging, electoral roll flaws and ballot paper shortages. The last polling stations closed Saturday after two weeks of voting for the 111-seat parliament across the vast and remote country where previous elections have been tarnished by violence.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for June 26 – July 2 2017

Though they have raised concerns about election cybersecurity and drawn the criticism of state election officials with the decision to designate the nation’s voting systems as “critical infrastructure, the Department of Homeland Security has steadfastly maintained that there has been no indication that “adversaries were planning cyber activity that would change the outcome of the coming US election.” Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”

The DHS inspector general’s Digital Forensics and Analysis Unit was involved in reviewing computer data from the federal agency, and from Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office, in an investigation stemming from Kemps’ claim that the federal government tried to hack his state’s election systems last Fall. In a letter delivered this week, the agency’s inspector general John Roth dismissed allegations that DHS attempted to scan or infiltrate the Georgia computer networks,” and that “the evidence demonstrated normal and appropriate use of Georgia’s public website.”

Citing reports compiled by US intelligence agencies investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, the Wall Street Journal reported that hackers believed to be Russian discussed how to steal Hillary Clinton’s emails from her private server and transfer them to Michael Flynn via an intermediary, named as Peter Smith, a veteran Republican operative. One of the people Smith appears to have tried to recruit, a former British government intelligence official named Matt Tait, related in a first person blog post that he was approached last summer by Smith to help verify hacked Hillary Clinton emails offered by a mysterious and most likely Russian source. According to Tait, Smith claimed to be working with Trump’s then foreign policy adviser, Michael Flynn, and showed documentation suggesting he was also associated with close Trump aides including Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.

Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and the vice chairman of the newly-formed Election Integrity Commission wrote a letter to all 50 states requesting their full voter-roll data, including the name, address, date of birth, party affiliation, last four Social Security number digits and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in the state. The backlash from state election officials and voting rights advocates alike was immediate and more than half the states, including many with Republican Secretaries of State, have refuse to comply with the request. In a statement released Friday, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hoseman, a Republican, suggested that the commission “can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”

In a Slate oped, election law specialist Richard Hasen suggests that the commission’s “focus on noncitizen voting makes sense, and the endgame is about passing federal legislation to make it harder for people to register and vote. The noncitizen focus fits in with Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric as well as the rhetoric of Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who has been advising Trump on voter fraud issues.” The ultimate goal of the commission could be dismantling the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which has long been in Republican crosshairs.

Following two unsuccessful repeal efforts in the Maine legislature, a voter-approved measure calling for ranked choice voting in the state’s election will remain in force. Needing a two-thirds vote in both houses of the legislature, lawmakers are likely to wait until the second half of the current session, which starts in January 2018. As the first statewide election scheduled that would use ranked-choice voting would be the party primary races set for June 2018, it is still uncertain if the new voting procedure will ever be implemented.

Republican legislative efforts to redraw judicial districts in North Carolina will not advance this session. Democrats and some court officials had argued that the bill was too significant to be rushed through at the end of session. The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm has challenged Seattle’s “democracy voucher” program. In 2015 voters agreed to a new $3 million tax in exchange for four $25 vouchers that they could sign over to candidates to foster engagement in politics and to benefit lesser-known candidates.

According to Udo Schneider, a security expert for cyber security consultants Trend Micro, the cost of influencing a national election in Germany would be around $400,000. That’s the sum it takes to buy followers on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, hire companies to write and disseminate fake news postings over a period of 12 months, and run sophisticated web sites to influence public opinion.

Voters in Mongolia will return to the polls next week for a presidential run-off election. Former martial arts star Khaltmaa Battulga of the opposition Democratic Party, who won the most votes but failed to secure the majority required, will face ruling Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) candidate Miyeegombo Enkhbold, who came second. The third-place finisher,Sainkhuu Ganbaatar of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP), has challenged the first round results and demanded a recount.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for June 19-25 2017

On the heals of a Bloomberg News report alleging that the Russians had infiltrated voter registration systems in 39 states, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence heard testimony from cybersecurity experts and national security officials about past and ongoing threats of cyberattacks on the American voting system. Also this week, Time Magazine reported that the hacking of state and local election databases in 2016 was more extensive than previously reported, including at least one successful attempt to alter voter information, and the theft of thousands of voter records that contain private information like partial Social Security numbers.

One of the Senate Committee witness, University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman contributed an oped to the Washington Post describing the severity of the threats and advocating the replacement of direct recording electronic voting equipment with paper ballot systems and routine risk-limiting post election audits of all elections. Verified Voting echoed these concerns and recommendation in commentary submitted to the Senate Committee following the hearing.

A McClatchy article described how state and local election officials, concerned about impacting voter confidence,  habitually downplay the vulnerability of voting equipment and processes. Commenting on revelations last week that voter registration technology vendor VR Systems has been the victim of cyberattacks, Verified Voting’s Susan Greenhalgh commented “[i]f attackers wanted to impact an election through an attack on a vendor like VR Systems, they could manipulate or delete voter records impacting a voter’s ability to cast a regular ballot. Or, they could cause the E-Pollbooks (electronic databases of voters) to malfunction, hampering the check-in process and creating long lines.”

This week it was also revealed that a data marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee had left personal data gathered on more than 198 million Americans, i.e. 61% of the population, exposed on the internet for almost two weeks earlier this month. UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery discovered more than a terabyte of data from Deep Root Analytics, a conservative data firm that identifies audiences for political ads, stored on a cloud server without the protection of a password and therefore accessible by anyone who found the URL.

Following the most expensive congressional election in American history, voters went to the polls in a special election run-off Tuesday in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District amid controversy over the state’s unauditable voting equipment. Even without considering reports of multiple cyberattacks on Kennesaw State University’s Election Center, where all of Georgia’s voting machines are programmed and the state’s voter data is maintained, the concern in Georgia is not necessarily associated with any specific hacking threat. Rather as noted by Verified Voting President Pamela Smith “You have an un-provable system. It might be right, it might not be right, and that absence of authoritative confirmation is the biggest problem. It’s corrosive.”

Responding the a ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court that a voter-passed initiative requiring a statewide ranked choice voting system was constitutional, the state senate gave initial approval to a bill that would amend the Maine Constitution to resolve the issues with the initiative. If the constitutional amendment receives the approval of two-thirds of the Legislature it will be placed before the voters. Facing pressure for contradicting the will of the voters, legislators earlier in the week had tabled a bill that would have repealed the original ballot initiative.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up an Ohio voting rights case on a technical challenge to the state’s right to reject a voter registration application on the basis of an error or omission unrelated to the voter’s qualifications. On the same day the court agreed to hear a case that found Wisconsin Republicans overreached in 2011 by drawing legislative districts that were so favorable to them that they violated the U.S. Constitution. In the same ruling, the justices issued a stay that blocked a lower court ruling that the state develop new maps by Nov. 1. The case is being watched nationally because it will likely resolve whether maps of lawmakers’ districts can be so one-sided that they violate the constitutional rights of voters. The question has eluded courts for decades.

In Texas, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos gave lawyers two weeks to file legal briefs in a case challenging the state’s vote ID requirement, with a final round of response briefs due July 17. Ramos also said she wants to receive arguments about whether Texas should be placed under pre-clearance — meaning the U.S. Justice Department would have to approve changes to voting laws or practices in the state to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act.

In spite of news of the exposure of voter data by Deep Root Analytics, Canadian Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould says it’s not the time to implement basic privacy and security rules for political parties’ collection of Canadians’ personal data. There are virtually no rules governing how Canada’s political parties collect, store and use information about individual voters gleaned from door-to-door outreach efforts, e-mail campaigns and Elections Canada data.

Voters in Papua New Guinea began a two voting period yesterday with election officials and government authorities calling for calm. Historically, tensions during polling, vote counting and the announcement of winners in PNG has erupted into widespread violence.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for June 12-18 2017

As new reports revealed that Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system was far more widespread than has been publicly disclosed, Pam Fessler at NPR asked the critical question: “If Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would Anyone Know?” Noting that the phishing campaign that has been described is just the kind of attack someone would launch if they wanted to manipulate votes, University of Michigan computer scientist Alex Halderman explained that “before every election, the voting machines have to be programmed with the design of the ballots — what are the races, who are the candidates.” Access to the election management software that is used to program ballots would allow an attacker to infect it with malicious software that could “spread to the individual machines on the memory cards, and then change votes on Election Day.”

Adding to information a classified National Security Agency document leaked earlier this month, three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation detailed a wave of attacks in the summer and fall of 2016, hit voting systems in as many as 39 states. This week, Maryland’s State Board of Elections revealed that it had detected “suspicious activity” on the computer system it uses for online voter registration before last fall’s election and called in cybersecurity experts to evaluate it, The newest disclosures of potentially deep vulnerabilities in the U.S.’s patchwork of voting technologies comes less than a week after former FBI Director James Comey warned Congress that Moscow isn’t done meddling. “They’re coming after America,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the election. “They will be back.”

Days before a closely-watched special election run-off in Georgia’s 6th District, a security researcher disclosed a gaping security hole at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, where the state’s election technology is programmed. The security failure left the state’s 6.7 million voter records and other sensitive files exposed to hackers, and may have been left un-patched for seven months. Georgia still uses the un-auditable Diebold AccuVote touchscreen DREs statewide (yes, the same machines that researchers at Princeton hacked over a decade ago) – and of course there is no paper trail.

In a Washington Post oped, Patrick Marion Bradley described the personal stories of disenfranchisement resulting from restrictive voter id requirements. Such individual stories are all too easily lost in rhetoric and political calculations.

In the latest effort to combat partisan redistricting, voting-rights advocates filed suit in Pennsylvania state court to nullify the state’s congressional-district map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The decision to challenge the maps in state court means that if the plaintiffs prevail, the ruling would set no precedent for challenges in other states. Plaintiffs inMaryland, North Carolina and Wisconsin have current challenges to partisan redistricting pending in federal courts.

After an overwhelming vote in favor of statehood in a boycott-plagued referendum, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló demanded that the U.S. government recognize his commonwealth as the 51st state. There is little chance that his demands will be acknowledged however given the current political environment in Congress.

The Texas Monthly reported on Travis County’s project to create STAR-Vote (Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable), an end-to-end encrypted electronic voting system. The Travis County Clerk’s office, the Texas elections office, Rice University professors Dan S. Wallach and Michael D. Byrne, and other academics came together to create the system, which encrypts votes cast and stores them in a database. It is the hope of Dana DeBeauvoir, the Travis County this new approach could reinvent electoral technology security.

Expatriate Canadians, who lose their voting rights after five years abroad, are questioning whether the Liberal government is deliberately allowing legislation aimed at restoring their voting rights to expire. Just before a scheduled hearing in February, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed to a government request for an adjournment given the introduction of Bill C-33 in late November of 2016. However, as Gill Frank, one of two expats spearheading the constitutional battle, “Nothing has happened since.”

Responding to a series of cyberattacks on government internet systems, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is calling for a law that would allow Germany to “hack back” and wipe out attacking servers. Germany’s education ministry is backing a new cybersecurity school where politicians and IT officials are taught to spot and react to hacking. In April the armed forces set up a cyberdefense unit that will soon employ 12,000 soldiers and 1,500 civilians.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for June 5-11 2017

A classified NSA report, leaked to the security-focused website The Intercept, described how Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election. While the report does not describe actual impacts on vote results from the November 2016 election it confirms the concerns of security experts and computer scientists that the highly decentralized, ageing U.S. election system remains profoundly vulnerable. The operation described in the document could have given attackers “a foothold into the IT systems of elections offices around the country that they could use to infect machines and launch a vote-stealing attack,” said J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer scientist. “We don’t have evidence that that happened,” he said, “but that’s a very real possibility.”

A few days after the leak, recently-fired FBI director James Comey, responding to a question about Russian cyberattacks on the American election system in his closely-watched Senate testimony, referenced “a massive effort to target government and non-governmental—near governmental—agencies like nonprofits.” Somewhat lost in the partisan political battle that has followed Comey’s testimony is the chilling impact of Russian efforts to undermine Western democracy. In his testimony, Comey described Russia as the “greatest threat of any country on earth,” and he warned Thursday that Russia is “coming after America,” regardless of party, “to undermine our credibility in the rest of the world.”

Cyber security guru (and Verified Voting Board of Advisors member) warned in a Washington Post oped that Congress must act to protect our voting infrastructure from attacks. Schneier argues that “[d]emocratic elections serve two purposes. The first is to elect the winner. But the second is to convince the loser. After the votes are all counted, everyone needs to trust that the election was fair and the results accurate. Attacks against our election system, even if they are ultimately ineffective, undermine that trust and — by extension — our democracy. Yes, fixing this will be expensive. Yes, it will require federal action in what’s historically been state-run systems. But as a country, we have no other option.”

A Fulton County Georgia  judge heard eight hours of testimony and arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit calling for paper ballots in the hotly contested June 20 runoff between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff. Rocky Mountain Foundation and members of Georgians for Verified Voting are demanding that Fulton County Georgia argue that the state’s touch screen-based voting system is “uncertified, unsafe and inaccurate” and that the county officials must instead use paper ballots in the election to have a verifiable transparent election.

Following a recent advisory opinion from Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court that found parts of a voter-supported law introducing ranked choice voting in Maine was not in line with the state’s constitution, state legislative committees were unable to reached a decision about two ranked-choice voting bills submitted in response to the court decision. One bill sought to send a constitutional amendment to voters and one proposed an outright repeal of the measure. The stalemate in committee means the full Legislature will have to decide which of as many as five different options it likes best.

The ACLU and the League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit seeking to stop implementation of Missouri’s new photo ID voting law in advance of a July 11 St. Louis special election, claiming the law is an attempt to disenfranchise voters. Under questioning, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft could name only one case of voter fraud that the new requirement would have prevented.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that redistricting by North Carolina Republican lawmakers was intended to dilute the power of black voters. The justices also threw out a ruling by the same federal judges ordering special elections by November to fill the state legislature seats at issue in the dispute.

Voters in Puerto Rico go to the polls today on a fifth referendum on US statehood. If statehood wins, as expected, the island will enact what’s known as the Tennessee Plan, an avenue to accession by which U.S. territories send a congressional delegation to demand to be seated in Washington. All opposition parties in the country have vowed to boycott the Sunday poll, further threatening its credibility as few expect that a vote in favor of statehood would in fact lead to statehood.

Arguing that it is the next logical step for a statute found to be discriminatory, lawyers for minority voters and politicians asked a federal judge to void the Texas voter ID law. The lawyers also said they will ask U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos to require Texas officials to get U.S. Justice Department approval for any future changes to election law or voting procedures to guard against additional attempts to discriminate against minority voters.

After Italy’s lower house of parliament failed to reach agreement on a proposed new electoral law, there were renewed calls for early elections. However, President Sergio Mattarella has stressed that a new electoral law is needed before a new election can be called as the current law risks creating competing majorities in the two chambers of parliament, making the country ungovernable.

Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May suffered a major setback in a tumultuous election, losing her overall majority in Parliament and throwing her government into uncertainty less than two weeks before it is scheduled to begin negotiations over withdrawing from the European Union. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday urged officials to schedule an election to pick a new constituent assembly for July 30, but an emboldened opposition immediately called for a nationwide sit-in to protest against the move.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 29 – June 2 2017

During comments at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been responsible for the breach of the nDemocratic National Committee and Clinton campaign e-mail accounts, as well as other attempts to aid the campaign of Donald Trump. Though a reversal of previous Kremlin denials of any Russian involvement in operations against Clinton and the Democrats, Putin continued to deny any state role in the hacking. Asked about the potential of Russian interference in European elections this year, Putin raised the possibility of “free-spirited Russian patriots” who might be inclined to meddle.

Paul Waldman, writing for The Washington Post, observes that the increasingly sharp partisan divide in the country is reflected in the

A group of technology experts has again written to Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp voicing concern over the state’s use of paperless touchscreen voting machines in the upcoming special election. A legal effort seeking to require voters’ use of paper ballots for the election was launched last week. Early voting has already begun in Georgia.

Following last week’s ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court that ranked-choice voting violates the state constitution, two bills were introduced in the state house. Democrats took different approaches to resolving the issue, but bipartisan support will be necessary for either bill to pass. On Friday, lawmakers heard from a parade of citizens speaking in support of ranked choice voting.

As part of a federal lawsuit, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has acknowledged that in 2011 Democrats drew the state’s congressional districts with the intention of defeating a Republican incumbent. Current Governor Larry Hogan is supporting calls for the creation of a nonpartisan redistricting commission. Republicans have fought independent redistricting commissions in Arizona and other states.

The U.S. Supreme Court has told North Carolina’s top court to reconsider a redistricting lawsuit filed by Democrats and allies after the nation’s highest court struck down congressional districts as racial gerrymanders. In the face of repeated defeats in federal court, North Carolina Republican remain undaunted in their effort to consolidate their political dominance. Also this week, Governor Roy Cooper said he would appeal a North Carolina court decision that upheld a Republican-backed law that reduced Cooper’s election oversight authority.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, Ohio’s challenge to a federal appeals court ruling that struck down the state’s aggressive method for purging voters from its registration rolls. Under Ohio law a voter is removed from a registration roll if they have not voted or updated their registration (for example, because they may have moved) over a six-year span. Civil rights advocates contend that such “voter purge” laws are suppressing the right to vote of many thousands of citizens.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a new voter ID bill into law. The new law is intended to loosen identification requirements from a 2011 law that a federal judge said was enacted by Republicans to intentionally discriminate against minority voters, who tend to vote for Democrats. Abbott also signed into law a bill that will end straight-party voting, requiring every candidate on state ballots to be chosen individually.

During comments at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been responsible for the breach of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign e-mail accounts, as well as other attempts to aid the campaign of Donald Trump. Though a reversal of previous Kremlin denials of any Russian involvement in operations against Clinton and the Democrats, Putin continued to deny any state role in the hacking. Asked about the potential of Russian interference in European elections this year, Putin raised the possibility of “free-spirited Russian patriots” who might be inclined to meddle.

Paul Waldman, writing for The Washington Post, observes that the increasingly sharp partisan divide in the country is reflected in voting laws. Many States with Democratic majority legislatures have passed laws requiring automatic voter registration, online and same day registration, as well as laws intended to make voting more convenient like in-person early voting and no-excuse absentee voting. By contrast, states with Republican majorities in the state house have passed laws that restrict access to the polls, photo id requirements, longer residency requirements and limiting or prohibiting early voting.

A group of technology experts has again written to Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp voicing concern over the state’s use of paperless touchscreen voting machines in the upcoming special election. A legal effort seeking to require voters’ use of paper ballots for the election was launched last week. Early voting has already begun in Georgia.

Following last week’s ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court that ranked-choice voting violates the state constitution, two bills were introduced in the state house. Democrats took different approaches to resolving the issue, but bipartisan support will be necessary for either bill to pass. On Friday, lawmakers heard from a parade of citizens speaking in support of ranked choice voting.

As part of a federal lawsuit, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has acknowledged that in 2011 Democrats drew the state’s congressional districts with the intention of defeating a Republican incumbent. Current Governor Larry Hogan is supporting calls for the creation of a nonpartisan redistricting commission. Republicans have fought independent redistricting commissions in Arizona and other states.

The U.S. Supreme Court has told North Carolina’s top court to reconsider a redistricting lawsuit filed by Democrats and allies after the nation’s highest court struck down congressional districts as racial gerrymanders. In the face of repeated defeats in federal court, North Carolina Republican remain undaunted in their effort to consolidate their political dominance. Also this week, Governor Roy Cooper said he would appeal a North Carolina court decision that upheld a Republican-backed law that reduced Cooper’s election oversight authority.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, Ohio’s challenge to a federal appeals court ruling that struck down the state’s aggressive method for purging voters from its registration rolls. Under Ohio law a voter is removed from a registration roll if they have not voted or updated their registration (for example, because they may have moved) over a six-year span. Civil rights advocates contend that such “voter purge” laws are suppressing the right to vote of many thousands of citizens.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a new voter ID bill into law. The new law is intended to loosen identification requirements from a 2011 law that a federal judge said was enacted by Republicans to intentionally discriminate against minority voters, who tend to vote for Democrats. Abbott also signed into law a bill that will end straight-party voting, requiring every candidate on state ballots to be chosen individually.

The likelihood of early elections increased after an agreement was reached between Italy’s four main political parties on a new electoral system. The new plan is modeled on the German version of proportional representation in which a 5 percent threshold must be met for a party to get seats in parliament. Facing the threat of an opposition boycott, the Nepalese government postponed the second phase of local elections by nine days to June 23.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 22-28 2017

DEFCON, the world’s longest running and largest underground hacking conference, has announced that the subject of this summer’s meeting will be voting machines. Hackers will attempt to compromise voting machines from a variety of perspectives: remote attacks, hardware and software vulnerabilities and potentials available to insiders with physical access to the equipment.

The Atlantic posted an extensive article on risk-limiting audits, which offer a simple low-tech way of verifying the accuracy of software-generated vote counts. In a risk-limiting audit a random sample of ballots is chosen and then hand-counted. That sample, plus a little applied math, can tell us whether the machines picked the right winner. Since risk-limiting audits verify elections while minimizing the number of audited ballots, they are both inexpensive and speedy. They largely eliminate the need for emergency recruitment of recount workers and can be conducted before the election must be certified by law.

Barbara Simons penned an oped in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune calling for the elimination of all internet voting and paperless voting machines. Simons notes that “[d]espite a decade of warnings from computer security experts, 33 states allow internet voting for some or all voters, and a quarter of our country still votes on computerized, paperless voting machines that cannot be recounted and for which there have been demonstrated hacks.”

The Supreme Court struck down two North Carolina congressional districts, ruling that lawmakers had violated the Constitution by relying too heavily on race in drawing them. The court rejected arguments from state lawmakers that their purpose in drawing the maps was not racial discrimination but partisan advantage. Richard Hasen notes that two footnotes in Justice Kagan’s opinion provide a useful tool for voting rights advocates and may limit legislators’ attempts to hide behind claims of partisan motivation to protect themselves from racial gerrymandering claims.

A lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court, argues that Georgia’s voting infrastructure is too old, unreliable and vulnerable to be used without a forensic review of its operating systems. The suit notes that most recently Fulton experienced a technical problem April 18 that delayed reporting of election results because of what officials called a “rare error” involving a voting memory card that didn’t properly upload its tallies.

Ina unanimous decision Maine’s high court ruled that the state’s ranked-choice voting system is unconstitutional, throwing the voter-approved law into jeopardy ahead of the 2018 election when it was supposed to be implemented. After the court decision the state legislature approved the introduction of two competing bills that address ranked-choice voting – one would repeal the first-in-the-nation voting law and the other would put a ballot question to voters on whether to change the state’s constitution to make it legal statewide.

Under legislation approved Tuesday by the Michigan State Senate, fees for long-shot election recounts would double. The move was prompted by the partially successful effort of Green Party nominee Jill Stein for a manual recount of last November’s election. Responding to court rulings that current voter id requirements discriminate against black and Latino voters, the Texas House approved legislation to overhaul the law.

Wisconsin’s attorney general on Monday asked the US Supreme Court to block a ruling that would force lawmakers to draw new legislative maps by November 1, contending legislators should not have to draw new lines unless the Supreme Court agrees with the three-judge panel that the existing maps are unconstitutional.

The Maltese government claims that it has come under attack from a Russian-backed campaign to undermine it, amid worsening relations with the Kremlin. Since Malta assumed the presidency of Europe’s Council of Ministers in January, the government’s IT systems have seen a rise in phishing, DDoS and malware attacks.

Nepal’s Maoist Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal resigned, paving the way for Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba to form the next government as per their agreement last year. Results of the first local elections in 20 years held on May 14 have still not been announced. The second vote is scheduled for June 14, but analysts question whether a new government will be able to pass the constitutional amendments in time or have enough time to prepare for second round elections.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 15-21 2017

Following a week of turmoil over the firing of FBI director James Comey, the Department of Justice named former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Moscow. Deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein had been under escalating pressure from Democrats, and even some Republicans, to appoint a special counsel after he wrote a memo that the White House initially cited as the rationale for Mr. Comey’s dismissal.

The Supreme Court declined to consider reinstating provisions of North Carolina’s 2013 omnibus elections law bill that included restrictive voter ID requirements, leaving in place an appeals court ruling that had struck down parts of the law as unconstitutional. Though the decision was a victory for voting rights advocates, many worry that it is only a temporary reprieve, postponing a showdown over what kind of voting rules are acceptable and how much influence partisanship should have over access to the ballot box.

A Washington Post editorial warned that  the recently announced Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity will likely endeavor to create further pretexts for GOP-dominated state legislatures determined to throw up barriers to minority turnout. The leading voice on the panel in Kansas Sewcretary of State Kris Kobach, described by the Post as a longtime champion of voter suppression laws who seconded as “absolutely correct” the president’s fabricated assertion that Hillary Clinton’s victory in the popular vote, which she won by nearly 3 million ballots, was a result of millions of illegal votes.

The closely-watched special election run-off election in Georgia’s 6th district will use 15 year old Diebold touchscreen voting machines that run on Microsoft Server 2000. “That’s a crap system,” said Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa in a phone interview; adding that the database in use, Microsoft Access is a “toy database” that should never be used for industrial applications.

Members of the Utah House GOP caucus threatened to sue Republican Governor Gary Herbert over whether he will call them into a special session to decide how a replacement for resigning U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz will be picked. At issue is the Governor’s “secret plan” for establishing the terms on which the special election will run rather than involving the legislature.

Dismissing Gov. Scott Walker’s recommendation, the Wisconsin legislature’s budget committee approved state funding for five of six Elections Commission staff positions that have been supported by federal grant that’s set to run out. Lawmakers from both parties agreed that the staffing was necessary to ensure the proper administration of elections in the state.

Turnout was high in Nepal’s first elections in nearly two decades, though some voters are frustrated by the slow vote counting and there are concerns about preparations for anticipated run-off elections next month.. The Diplomat posted an article describing enthusiasm about the local elections in regions hit by earthquakes last yearTime ran an extensive piece examining Russia’s efforts to undermine Western democracy.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 8-14 2017

Voting rights advocates and civil rights groups expressed outrage over the choice of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as co-chair of a new Commission on Election Integrity. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer noted that the choice of Kobach, who has repeatedly made unsubstantiated voter-fraud allegations, “is akin to putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department.” Also this week, a federal judge ordered Kobach to give the American Civil Liberties Union two documents outlining proposed changes to a federal voting law.

President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading a counterintelligence investigation to determine whether associates of Trump may have coordinated with Russia to interfere with the U.S. presidential election last year. Calls to appoint an independent prosecutor have simmered for months, but until now, they had been voiced almost entirely by Democrats. But now even Republicans are joining the call for a special prosecutor. Senator John McCain, said that he was “disappointed in the president’s decision” and that it bolstered the case “for a special congressional committee to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.”

Lost in the uproar over the firing of Comey, John Thompson, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau, announced that he is resigning, leaving the agency leaderless at a time when it faces a crisis over funding for the 2020 decennial count of the U.S. population and beyond. Voting rights advocates are concerned with the resignation and the apparently effort to underfund the 2020 census as the data derived from the census is used to determine political representation, critical to a functioning democracy.

The Atlantic published two important pieces. One, by Bruce Schneier, argues that while the internet can be useful in allowing citizens to register online, the its fundamental vulnerability and the unique nature of voting mean that “we simply can’t build an Internet voting system that is secure against hacking because of the requirement for a secret ballot.” In the other piece, Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice makes the case for voter marked paper ballot voting systems. He observes that “the most important technology for enhancing security has been around for millennia: paper. Specifically, every new voting machine in the United States should have a paper record that the voter reviews, and that can be used later to check the electronic totals that are  reported.”

Eleven voters have asked Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to review the state’s voting system ahead of next month’s hotly contested 6th Congressional District runoff. The request is allowed under state law. It comes after one of the three counties in the district — Fulton — experienced a technical snafu on April 18 that delayed reported election results in the race. It also follows a letter to Kemp in March from a group of voting advocates who recommended that the state overhaul its elections system and begin using a system with a paper audit trail.

Elections clerks across Montana could find themselves increasingly challenged to serve voters with severe physical disabilities because of a dwindling supply of polling equipment designed especially for people who cannot use traditional voting machines. Existing inventories of ES&S AutoMARK ballot marking devices are antiquated and in disrepair and elections officials have been unable to replace the aging machines with newer, modern equipment because of state law.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday that challenges the process of validating signatures on absentee ballots in New Hampshire. The suit says current law allows election officials to reject an absentee ballot without giving notice to the voter, if they think there’s a signature mismatch in the voter’s paperwork. It also says it puts moderators in the difficult position of acting as handwriting experts.

Texas is on the verge of eliminating straight-ticket voting, which supporters say would force voters to pay attention to every race on a ballot but critics say could decrease turnout and put the state at risk of yet another civil rights lawsuit. Statewide, 63 percent of Texas voters cast straight-ticket ballots during the November general elections, according to Texas Election Source, a non-partisan data-driven public policy group.

The US watched Russians hack France’s computer networks during the presidential election – and tipped off French officials before it became public, a US cyber official has told the Senate. France’s election campaign commission said on Saturday that “a significant amount of data” — and some fake information — was leaked on social networks following a hacking attack on Emmanuel Macron’s successful presidential campaign.

The Indian Election Commission ruled out any possibility of the EVMs being tampered with in elections even as it announced that all future elections will be held with VVPAT slips to prevent any doubts while the AAP demanded ‘hackathon’, a view others were not apparently enthusiastic about at an all-party meeting convened to discuss worries over the machines.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 1-7 2017

The news is dominated by the“massive, co-ordinated hacking” of the campaign of French Presidential front-runner Emmanuel Macron. Minutes before the official end of campaigning, the Macron campaign said in a statement that it had been the victim of a major hacking operation that saw thousands of emails and other internal communications dumped into the public domain. The Atlantic noted that the attack drew immediate parallels to the  cyberattacks that hit Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign last year, as well as to alleged electoral interference in other parts of Europe. It is likely that the leak, actively publicized by Wikileaks, far right activists and on the social media site 4chan, includes fake or modified documents along with genuine emails and documents. Further reporting here, here, here, and here.

During a public hearing Wednesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey predicted that if left undeterred, Russian hackers will one day attempt to change the vote tally in an American election. While there is no evidence to suggest that Russian hackers were able to alter vote counts in the 2016 election, some election officials fear that enemies of the US will attempt to disrupt future elections in more a direct manner. The vulnerability of electronic voting equipment used is the US is well documented.

Speaking on a panel at Harvard University, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers agreed at a panel at Harvard University that Russia likely believed it had achieved its goals and could attempt to repeat its performance in elections in other countries. “Their purpose was to sew discontent and mistrust in our elections they wanted us to be at each others’ throat when it was over,” Rogers said at the panel at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It’s influencing, I would say, legislative process today. That’s wildly successful.” As the Washington Post observed, “By now it should be clear that the new normal of Russian conduct on the international stage includes tampering with elections in Western democracies to boost candidates the Kremlin believes likely to do its bidding and to harass those who won’t.”

Incoming Maricopa County Arizona Recorder Adrian Fontes claims that as many as 58,000 voters may have been left off the rolls last November because they failed to provide proof of citizenship with their registration forms. Fontes said that he had discovered up to 100,000 state-issued voter-registration forms that employees had filed for more than a decade without saving the information in the voter database. Staffers explained that the applicants had failed to provide proof of citizenship. Proposition 200 passed by Arizona voters in 2004 requires aspiring voters to submit a passport, birth certificate, naturalization number, tribal membership or driver’s license obtained after 1996 to participate in elections.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered Georgia to temporarily reopen voter registration ahead of a hotly contested congressional runoff in the 6th District. A suit filed by The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on behalf of five civil rights and voting rights organizations, claimed that Georgia law cuts off voter registration for federal runoff elections two months earlier than allowed according to federal law.

The Illinois Board of Elections says that last August hackers gained access to the information of 80,000 Illinois voters — including their social security numbers and driver’s licenses. Speaking at a hearing of a state Senate subcommittee on cybersecurity, IT staff said hackers had access to Illinois’ system for nearly three weeks before they were detected. The hackers amassed records by searching by local voter identification numbers, systematically searching nine-digit codes starting from “000000001” and incrementally adding one.

A report released by legislative auditors Friday says the Maryland State Board of Elections needlessly exposed the full Social Security numbers of almost 600,000 voters to potential hacking, risking theft of those voters’ identities. The Baltimore Sun quoted Johns Hopkins computer scientist Avi Rubin, “This report tells me that the [elections board] is way behind the high-tech industry in maintaining the availability and security of their information.” Rubin said the board “needs to get its act together and catch up with best practices in the industry.”

Nevada, the first state to implement direct recording electronic voting machines equipped with voter verified paper trail printers, is planning to replace those machines for the 2018 elections. Two vendors – Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software – were invited to demonstrate their current equipment at in a daylong open house at the State Capitol.

A conflict between Utah lawmakers and Governor Gary Herbert over how to handle a potential special election to fill a congressional vacancy has sparked a proposal to limit the governor’s power to call special sessions of the Legislature. House Majority Leader Brad Wilson said he plans to propose an amendment to the Utah Constitution that would take away at least some of the governor’s control over special sessions. If passed by at least two-thirds of the Legislature, it would go before voters in November 2018.

The Indian Election Commission will convene a meeting next week with all seven national parties and 48 recognized state parties to discuss issues related to electronic voting machines (EVMs) and voter-verfied paper audit trail and to seek suggestions regarding its upcoming electronic voting machine “hackathon” challenge. The challenge is intended “to give the political parties a fair chance to put the EVMs to test and prove their tamperability,” according to a senior commission officer.

In a move similar to one his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez used almost 20 years ago, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro called for a constitutional assembly. Maduro has faced with daily protests for weeks and critics say he is calling the assembly precisely to avoid or delay free elections.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for April 24-30 2017

The Guardian reported that in December former MI6 officer Christopher Steele provided the UK Government alleging extensive contacts and collusion between the the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Court papers say Steele decided to pass on the information he had collected because it was “of considerable importance in relation to alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election”, that it “had implications for the national security of the US and the UK” and “needed to [be] analysed and further investigated/verified”.

The House Intelligence Committee investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has agreed on a witness list of between 36 and 48 people, including Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser; Roger Stone, a Trump confidant; Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser; and Carter Page, an early Trump campaign adviser. Already last week, the committee had announced thatit had invited three former officials with knowledge of Russia’s interference — former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

The Maine House rejected a bill that would have required voters to present photo identification at their polling places in order to cast a ballot. The bill will likely still receive a vote in the state Senate, but it appears all but dead for 2017 with the House’s rejection. Meanwhile, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum signed legislation amending the state’s voter identification laws Monday, April 24, despite warnings it doesn’t comply with a federal judge’s ruling. Last year, a federal judge ruled previous changes to the state’s voter ID laws have placed an “undue burden” on Native Americans and others.

In North Carolina, judges voted 2-1 to stop a new law from taking effect that would curtail the new Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s control over state and local elections. Earlier in the week, Republicans lawmakers overrode the governor’s veto of the bill but the judge’s majority decision ruling said Cooper was likely to succeed in challenging the law, which dilutes the ability governors have had for more than a century to pick election board majorities.

Since March 10, federal judges issued three consecutive rulings against Texas’ legislative redistricting, each finding that the state had drawn the maps with the intent to discriminate against minority voters.“It’s the third strike against Texas in a matter of weeks,” said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a lead counsel for the Latino organizations in the redistricting case. “[The laws have] been found not just to have discriminated as a side effect, but these are three decisions finding that Texas intentionally racially discriminated against minority voters.”

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe announced that he had broken the record for restoring voting rights to convicted felons, calling it his “proudest achievement” as governor. McAuliffe said he had individually restored rights to 156,221 Virginians, surpassing the previous record-holder by a nose. As governor of Florida from 2007 to 2011, Charlie Crist restored voting rights to 155,315 felons, according to figures that McAuliffe’s office obtained from Florida.

The campaign of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by what appear to be the same Russian operatives responsible for hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential election, a cybersecurity firm warns in a new report. The report has heightened concerns that Russia may turn its playbook on France in an effort to harm Mr. Macron’s candidacy and bolster that of Mr. Macron’s rival, the National Front leader Marine Le Pen, in the final weeks of the French presidential campaign.

In response to the Indian Election Commission’s electronic voting machine challenge, a group of engineers and computer scientists have urged chief election commissioner Nasim Zaidi to allow them an opportunity participate in the exercise fully and fairly to assess the security strengths and weaknesses in the security of the machines. Poorvi L. Vora, professor of computer science at the George Washington University and a member of the group, wrote in an article that “the Election Commission should allow experts a reasonable amount of time to examine machines whose entire design has been secret for so many years. The experts should be able to work in a laboratory space of their choosing, with the freedom to fully explore the system and its vulnerabilities, including physical tampering, as any attacker with some access to a single storage locker might have.”

Turkey’s main opposition party announced it will challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s April 16 referendum victory to replace the country’s parliamentary democracy with an all-powerful “presidential system.” The opposition will ask the European Court of Human Rights to render judgment, a day after Turkey’s top administrative court ruled it lacked jurisdiction over the electoral body whose oversight of the voting has sparked daily nationwide protests.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for April 17-23 2017

According to reporting by Reuters, a Moscow-based think tank linked run by retired senior Russian foreign intelligence officials appointed by Vladimir Putin developed plans for a propaganda and misinformation campaign aimed at influencing the 2016 US Presidential election. Sources interviewed by Reuters described two documents produced by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies that outlined strategies for influencing the election. The first was aimed at encouraging U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia, while the second, based on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be elected recommended focusing on voter fraud to undercut the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation.

An article in Wired examining the fight against partisan gerrymandering and suggests that current efforts may the most auspicious in decades due to new quantitative approaches—measures of how biased a map is, and algorithms that can create millions of alternative maps—that could help set a concrete standard for how much gerrymandering is too much. Last November, some of these new approaches helped convince a United States district court to invalidate the Wisconsin state assembly district map—the first time in more than 30 years that any federal court has struck down a map for being unconstitutionally partisan. That case is now bound for the Supreme Court.

Within days of Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s resignation, new Governor Kay Ivey has changed the date for the special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat previously held by Jeff Sessions to this calendar year. Bentley had been criticized for putting the special election off until next year and Ivey moved quickly to set the primary for August 15, with a runoff, if necessary, for September 26. The general election will be held on December 12.

With the closely-watched special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional district going to a run-off in June, civil rights and voting organizations have filed a suit challenging a Georgia law that prohibits voters from voting in the runoff election who weren’t registered in time for the first round. The plaintiff’s allege that the restriction violates Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to allow voters to participate in any election for federal office as long as they register at least 30 days prior.

Last week, Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske claimed that the state’s DMV of encouraged the registration of non-citizen voters, by allowing ID-seekers to also fill out voter registration forms at driver’s licenses offices even if they had presented a green card. Voting right advocates and DMV officials were quick to point out that federal law requires the DMV to submit voter registration applications to the state’s election officials regardless of the applicant’s apparent citizenship status. Cegavske on Wednesday released a statement saying that research by her department had found three non-citizens that are alleged to have voted in the November 2016 election in November, though she declined to say if her office would attempt to prosecute the three voters.

A voting rights group in North Carolina called for state and local officials to investigate whether allies of North Carolina’s former governor and the state Republican Party broke laws when hundreds of people were accused of voter fraud or absentee ballot irregularities last November. Democracy North Carolina said most of the accusations were irresponsible because the claims weren’t backed by evidence or could be eliminated based on cursory reviews of voter roll information. The protests were designed to intimidate voters for political gain or put in doubt the election result, the group’s report describing its own review alleges.

For the third time this Spring, courts have found Texas voting districts unconstitutional. This week it was the state legislative districts that were determined by a three-judge federal panel were also intentionally drawn to dilute votes based on race, and also violated the “one person one vote” principle of equal-sized voting districts that is the core consideration of the Voting Rights Act.

A New York Times article examined the role of Russian-sponsored misinformation in today’s presidential election in France. Turkey’s high election board has rejected formal calls by the country’s main opposition parties to annul the result of a referendum that will grant RecepTayyip Erdoğan sweeping new powers as president and the British parliament overwhelmingly agreed to a early general election on June 8, less than 12 months after deciding to quit the European Union.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for April 10-16 2017

A Guardian article reports that according to a source close to US Congressional investigations, the committees “now have specific concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion … between people in the Trump campaign and agents of [Russian] influence relating to the use of hacked material.” The wide-ranging article describes how already in 2015 British and other foreign intelligence services had become aware of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. The FBI and CIA appear to have been slow to pursue information provided by foreign intelligence sources, in part because of US laws prohibiting US agencies from examining the private communications of American citizens without warrants.

In reference to hacks of the DNC and political figures last summer, University of Michigan computer scientist and Verified Voting Board of Advisors member Alex Halderman said he thinks “we’re going to see a lot more attacks like them in future campaigns.” Though most think US voting systems are secure because they are different from county to county and most are not connected to the internet, Halderman noted that an attacker can select the machines that are the most vulnerable or attack the third-party vendors that provide the memory cards for each machine. Few if any states carry out post-election audits and forensic examinations sufficient to determine whether their voting machines were hacked.

With all Republicans voting yes and all Democrats voting no, the Iowa Senate gave final approval Thursday to contentious legislation that will require voters to show government-issued identification at the polls and reduce the time period for early voting. The bill now heads to Governor Terry Branstad, who is expected to sign it. In Montana, a federal judge on Tuesday denied a request to delay the printing and mailing of ballots for next month’s special congressional election for three minor party and independent candidates who are suing to be on the ballot. The judge agreed with the plaintiffs that the filing requirements were overly burdensome but was not prepared to delay the the election.

After being rebuffed once by judges who determined lawmakers went too far, Republican legislators on Tuesday tried a second time to dilute the power of North Carolina’s new Democratic governor to run elections. In separate votes, the state House and Senate voted along party lines to trim the power governors have had for more than a century to oversee elections by appointing the state and county elections boards that settle disputes and enforce ballot laws. Governor Roy Cooper has indicated he will veto the legislation, having challenged similar legislation in court earlier this year.

For a second time, a judge ruled that Texas lawmakers violated federal voting rights protections by intentionally discriminating against minority voters when they approved a strict law requiring an approved photo ID to cast a ballot. In a 10-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos wrote that the state “has not met its burden” to prove that Texas legislators could have enforced the 2011 voter ID law “without its discriminatory purpose.”

Plaintiffs from Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico filed their opening brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit challenging discriminatory overseas voting laws and making the case that where you live shouldn’t impact your right to vote for president. Under current law, an American citizen who moves from any state to a foreign country retains their right to vote for federal office in their last state of residence. However, citizens moving to one the U.S. Territories lose the right to vote in Federal elections.

The Electoral Council of Ecuador has announced that it will recount 10%, or just over 1.3 million ballots from the April 2 presidential election, bowing to pressure from opposition leader Guillermo Lasso and his supporters. Lasso has alleged fraud and is unlikely to accept a partial recount as adequate to confirm the election of ruling party candidate Lenin Moreno. In India, faced with allegations from several political parties that electronic voting machines could be manipulated, the Election Commission has publicly challenged political parties, scientists and technical experts to demonstrate that EVMs could be hacked.

Turkey votes today in a referendum that could have significant ramifications for the future of the country. Voters are being asked to approve or reject sweeping changes to the Turkish constitution including the elimination of the position of Prime Minister and the transferal of executive power to the president. The newly empowered president would be able to dissolve parliament, govern by decree and appoint many of the judges and officials tasked with scrutinizing his decisions. Opposition leaders are concerned that the new system would threaten the separation of powers on which liberal democracies have traditionally depended.

In reference to hacks of the DNC and others last summer, University of Michigan computer scientist and Verified Voting Board of Advisors member Alex Halderman said he thinks “we’re going to see a lot more attacks like them in future campaigns.” Though most think US voting systems are secure because they are different from county to county and most are not connected to the internet, Halderman noted that an attacker can select the machines that are the most vulnerable or attack the third-party vendors that provide the memory cards for each machine. No states carry out audits and forensic examinations sufficient to determine whether their voting machines were hacked.

With all Republicans voting yes and all Democrats voting no, the Iowa Senate gave final approval Thursday to contentious legislation that will require voters to show government-issued identification at the polls and will reduce the time period for early voting. The bill now heads to Gov. Terry Branstad, who is expected to sign it. A federal judge on Tuesday denied a request to delay the printing and mailing of ballots for Montana’s special congressional election for three minor party and independent candidates who are suing to be in the race. The judge agreed that the filing requirements were overly burdensome but was not prepared to delay the the election.

After being rebuffed once by judges who determined lawmakers went too far, Republican legislators on Tuesday tried a second time to dilute the power of North Carolina’s new Democratic governor to run elections. In separate votes, the state House and Senate voted along party lines to trim the power governors have had for more than a century to oversee elections by appointing the state and county elections boards that settle disputes and enforce ballot laws. Governor Roy Cooper has indicated he will veto the legislation, having challenged similar legislation in court earlier this year.

For a second time, a judge ruled that state lawmakers violated federal voting rights protections by intentionally discriminating against minority voters when they approved a strict law requiring an approved photo ID to cast a ballot. In a 10-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos wrote that the state “has not met its burden” to prove that Texas legislators could have enforced the 2011 voter ID law “without its discriminatory purpose.”

Plaintiffs from Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico filed their opening brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit challenging discriminatory overseas voting laws and making the case that where you live shouldn’t impact your right to vote for president. Under current law, an American citizen who moves from any state to a foreign country retains their right to vote for federal office in their last state of residence. However, citizens moving to one the U.S. Territories lose the right to vote in Federal elections.

The Electoral Council of Ecuador has announced that it will recount 10%, or just over 1.3 million ballots from the April 2 presidential election, bowing to pressure from opposition leader Guillermo Lasso and his supporters. Lasso has alleged fraud and is unlikely to accept a partial recount as adequate to confirm the election of ruling party candidate Lenin Moreno. Faced with allegations from several political parties that electronic voting machines could be manipulated, the India Election Election Commission has publicly challenged political parties, scientists and technical experts to demonstrate that EVMs could be hacked.

Turkey votes today in a referendum that could have significant ramifications for the future of the country. Voters are being asked to approve or reject sweeping changes to the Turkish constitution including eliminating the position of Prime Minister and transferring executive power to the president. The newly empowered president would be able to issue decrees and appoint many of the judges and officials tasked with scrutinizing his decisions. Opposition members are concerned that the new system would threaten the separation of powers on which liberal democracies have traditionally depended.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for April 3-9 2017

At an Election Assistance Commission hearing, a DHS official made the case for his agency’s designation of voting systems as critical infrastructure, emphasizing the designation did not undermine the autonomy of state election administration. Robert Hanson, DHS’ director of the prioritization and modeling at Office of Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis, noted that many state and local governments have turned to DHS for such support and warned that new security flaws could be introduced if the replacement systems aren’t properly vetted. State and local officials, however, reiterated their concerns on the critical infrastructure designation and the National Association of Secretaries of State will continue to ask the administration to rescind the critical infrastructure designation for election systems.

Under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, Devin Nunes has stepped down “temporarily” from his role in leading the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. The investigation relates to statements Nunes made last month regarding U.S. surveillance operations aimed at foreign targets had incidentally collected communications involving members of President-elect Trump’s transition team, of which he was a member. His recusal leaves the inquiry in the hands of other rightwing Republicans and it is unclear how much effect, if any, his absence would have on an investigation stalled by deep partisan infighting.

An FBI investigation has determined a “security researcher” was behind data breaches at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems and that researcher’s activities was not in violation of federal law. In what seems to be a “white hat” hack, a researcher at least twice breached the KSU system apparently in an attempt to demonstrate its vulnerability. A closely watched special election this month in Georgia will be conducted using unverifiable direct recording electronic equipment maintained and programmed at the KSU Election Center.

A federal magistrate judge has ordered Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hand over for review the documents that he took to a meeting with President Trump outlining a strategic plan for the Department of Homeland Security. The U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., will determine whether the documents are relevant to two federal lawsuits seeking to overturn a Kansas law that requires voters to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when they register to vote.

Montana Governor Steve Bullock reignited a debate over all mail ballot elections when he inserted language specifying that “the 2017 special election to fill the vacancy in the office of the United States representative for Montana may be conducted by mail,” into an unrelated election bill that had reached his desk. Republican legislators, fearing that an all mail ballot election would result in higher turnout therefore diminish their party’s chances, had defeated similar legislation in the state Senate last week. Montana State law allows the governor to issue such “amendatory vetoes” to bills he generally supports but will only sign with his suggested changes. The amendments must be approved by both legislative chambers for the bill, including the originally passed language, to become law.

On a party-line vote the North Carolina House has approved a bill that would merge the state’s ethics and election boards and significantly diminish the power of the political party of the governor. Roy Cooper, the Democratic Governor has threatened to veto the bill, which has been fast-tracked in Senate. Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in the House and Senate, so the Governor may pursue legal action to stop the bill as he did successfully with a similar proposal passed before his inauguration in January.

U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos will wait until after the Texas legislative session is over to order remedies to its voter identification law, but does not believe current legislative action will affect a pending lawsuit against the state. Gonzales Ramos had ordered temporary fixes to the law ahead last November’s presidential election and Republicans had introduced legislation this year that resembled the judge’s measures. They argue that the changes in the bill, which has passed in the Senate and is pending in the House, would have an impact on the judge’s ruling in the lawsuit but Gonzales Ramos disagreed. In the same ruling, the judge also allowed the Justice Department to withdraw from the case, a request made after President Donald Trump took office in January.

The ruling Liberal government in Canada has rejected calls for internet voting. A special parliamentary committee report issued last month expressed concern about the security of online voting and recommended against pursuing it until those concerns could be addressed. In a formal response to the committee’s report, Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould said the government agrees with the committee. “While Canadians feel that online voting in federal elections would have a positive effect on voter turnout, their support is contingent on assurances that online voting would not result in increased security risks,” Gould wrote. “We agree.”

In a rare development, both the winning and losing parties in Ecuador’s presidential election are supporting a recount to verify the accuracy of he announced results. Country Alliance, the incumbent party, accepted the challenge of conservative challenger Guillermo Lasso, who has alleged fraud and vote rigging. Observers from the Organization of American States reported that they had “found no discrepancies between the observed records and the official data”. The recount is already underway.

As Indian politicians debate the accuracy and reliability of electronic voting machines, Russia has expressed interested in observing India’s technology with goal of using it in their presidential election in 2018. In return, Russia would assist India in developing a “state-of-the-art tabulation system” for counting of votes. Since by-elections earlier this year, allegations of voting machine tampering have been a significant issue in the Indian Parliament, with various opposition leaders disrupting proceedings to protest the issue.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 27 – April 2 2017

Neil Jenkins, from DHS’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, gave the first detailed account of the process leading up to the controversial decision to designate election systems as critical infrastructure shortly after the 2016 presidential election. In the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza concluded that “the evidence is now clear that the White House and Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have worked together to halt what was previously billed as a sweeping investigation of Russian interference in last year’s election.”

Just days after the Arizona Governor signed a new law opponents said will make it harder for citizen initiatives to make the ballot, Republican Arizona lawmakers are reviving stripped parts of that legislation that will make it much easier for opponents to challenge initiatives in court. A measure that would cut off one of the main avenues for challenging legislative redistricting plans was approved by a Florida House committee, alarming groups that fought maps struck down by the courts in recent years for political gerrymandering.

A bill that would have allowed Montana counties to conduct this Spring’s special election to replace at-large Congressman Ryan Zinke entirely by mail ballot has been defeated. Since being introduced, the bill went for a roller-coaster ride. Shortly after it cleared the Senate by a comfortable margin, the chairman of the Montana State Republican Party, state Rep. Jeff Essmann, sent an email to party members warning that its passage would mean higher turnout and a lower chance of winning for Republicans.

A Texas Senate committee cleared legislation that would overhaul the state’s voter identification rules, an effort to comply with court rulings that the current law discriminates against black and Latino voters. Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel has filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging a ruling that overturned the state’s Republican-drawn legislative districts.

After a video demonstrating that paper trail printers on electronic voting machines could be compromised went viral, there have been further calls in India for a return to paper ballot voting systems. Protesters stormed and set fire to Paraguay’s Congress on Friday after the senate secretly voted for a constitutional amendment that would allow President Horacio Cartes to run for re-election and in a move rejected throughout the region and decried as a “coup” by the opposition, Venezuela’s Supreme Court effectively shut down congress, saying it would assume all legislative functions amid its contention that legislators are operating outside of the law.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 20-26 2017

The week began with the confirmation by FBI Director James Comey that that an investigation of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign have been underway since last July. Then Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes mysteriously disappeared into the night leaving a committee staffer in an Uber taxi the night before hastily arranging a press conference to reveal that he has seen evidence of incidental surveillance of the Trump transition team. Then Nunes cancelled the committee’s next open hearing, a move Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, called a “dodge” to avoid another bad press day for the President. Schiff has questioned the chairman’s ability to lead an unbiased investigation.

The New York Times notes that “nationwide, Republican state legislators are again sponsoring a sheaf of bills tightening requirements to register and to vote. And while they have traditionally argued that such laws are needed to police rampant voter fraud — a claim most experts call unfounded — some are now saying the perception of fraud, real or otherwise, is an equally serious problem, if not worse.”

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a bill requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls. The legislation is strikingly familiar to a measure that the state Supreme Court struck down in 2014. The bill contained some new provisions, most notably one that allows people without photo identification to sign a sworn statement saying they are registered in Arkansas, but it is certain to face another court challenge. In Iowa a similarly contentious voter ID bill cleared the Senate by a straight party-line vote and will return to the House where it was initiated by Secretary of State Paul Pate.

It now seems that Kennesaw State University officials received a warning before the presidential election that a server system used by its election center may be vulnerable to a data breach but waited until another breach earlier this month, just before a closely-watched special election to notify state officials. A spokeswoman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is said to have been furious at university officials for not telling his office about the contacts before this month, said he has confidence in how the presidential election was run and that additional data checks by the office confirm the election’s results.

After defeating a proposal from the Governor earlier in the week, the Maryland Senate approved a bill that would require the state to create a nonpartisan commission for redistricting. However the new plan is contingent on five other states agreeing to do the same. Senators were divided between those who see the bill as a hollow gesture and others who say it’s a first step toward fixing Maryland’s confusing, gerrymandered political districts.

The fight over Montana’s only congressional seat was thrust into the legislative arena , as lawmakers continued debate over whether to conduct the May 25 special election by mail. Passions flared in the House Judiciary Committee as dozens of people — some driving more than 400 miles to attend a hearing — urged lawmakers to save counties from financial hardship and logistical nightmares by allowing the election to be held with only mail-in ballots.

A motion filed in U.S. District Court claims that Texas should be blocked from using a map of congressional districts that was found to have been drawn in violation of the U.S. Voting Rights Act, a federal court was told Thursday. A ruling earlier this month invalidated three districts that the court said were drawn by Republicans to intentionally discriminate against Latino and black voters.

Bulgarians voted in a closely-fought election, with the centre-right GERB party challenged for power by Socialists who say they will improve ties with Russia and the overwhelming majority of the Hong Kong’s 7.3 million people have no say in deciding their next leader, with the winner chosen Sunday by a 1,200-person “election committee” stacked with pro-Beijing and pro-establishment loyalists.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 13-19 2017

An Associated Press article reported on the plight of many election officials across the country that must scout eBay to find the obsolete zip drives and other computer accessories required to run their aging voting equipment. Quite apart from the serious security vulnerabilities inherent in using computers with deprecated software and equipment that is no longer maintained by the manufacturer, simply keeping sufficient units in working order has become a challenge in many counties. Many jurisdictions are still using equipment that was produced by vendors that are no longer in business (see Delaware and several jurisdictions in Pennsylvania and Virginia.)

Former Senators Carl Levin and John Warner provided some insight into the appropriate approach to congressional investigations of allegations of election meddling and collusion between the Russia and the Trump campaign. “Whether it is done by the Intelligence Committees, a joint or select committee, or some other congressionally created framework, a vital goal of any such investigation must be bipartisanship.”

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Roger Brodman dismissed a challenge to Arizona’s congressional and legislative district maps drawn by an independent commission in 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court has previously upheld the legality of the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission itself and the legislative district maps

A group of technology experts, most of whom are members of Verified Voting’s Board of Advisors signed a letter urging Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp to abandon the use of electronic voting machines in upcoming special elections while the FBI reviews a suspected data breach. Last week we learned that the FBI was investigating an alleged data breach in Georgia at the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University, which is responsible for ensuring the integrity of the voting systems and developing and implementing security procedures for the election management software installed in all county election offices and voting systems. Not surprisingly election officials, who have an election to run, rejected the technology experts’ calls to use paper ballots but the Secretary of State’s office has stated that they will be running the special elections “in house”, albeit still with the involvement of personnel from KSU.

Nevada Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson and Senate Majority Leader Aaron Ford, both Las Vegas Democrats, have each introduced legislation that would ease the path for the restoration of voting rights to convicted felons who have completed their sentences. The Assembly bill would immediately restore the rights of ex-felons convicted of non-violent crimes after they serve their sentence or are discharged from parole or probation, regardless of whether that was honorably or dishonorably, while the Senate bill would restore rights either after completion of probation or parole or one year after their term, whichever comes first. It also decreases the wait time before they can ask the court to seal their records.

After a decade of delays in enforcing legislation requiring voter verified paper records of all votes in New Jersey, lawmakers have introduced a bill that would require new voting machines purchased or leased after its passage to produce a paper record. One of the Assembly bill’s co-sponsors is Assemblymen Reed Gusciora, who has been a vocal critic of the state’s Sequoia AVC Advantage direct recording electronic voting machines. In 2004 he filed a lawsuit in an attempt to force the state to upgrade to more secure systems. With Advantages now entering their third decade of operation, the time may have finally arrived for accurate and reliable voting equipment in New Jersey.

A three-judge panel ruled that the North Carolina General Assembly’s attempt to revamp the state elections board and ethics commission weeks before Democrat Roy Cooper was sworn in as the new governor violated the state Constitution. Adopted in a special session shortly after Cooper defeated Republican McCrory in the elections, the law altered a longstanding process that gave the governor the power to appoint three members from his party to preside over elections as well as two members from the other party. Instead, the two boards would be merged into one evenly divided between the political parties and between gubernatorial and legislative appointments.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have required the state Department of Elections to provide local registrars with a list of voters who, according to data-matching systems, have been found to be registered in another state. McAuliffe said he believed the bill would have endangered the voting rights of some Virginians and increased the administrative burden on local governments.

French authorities are on high alert to head off a cyber-attack that could affect the result of the upcoming presidential election.
Prime targets could be candidates’ websites and government networks. Earlier this month the government decided to abandon plans to allow internet voting for French citizens overseas in June’s legislative elections. Guillaume Poupard, Anssi’s chief, publicly said that the current voting platform is “more reliable” than the previous 2012 election, but “the level of threat is much higher today”.

The surprising victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in four out of five state polls earlier this month has renewed challenges to the accuracy of India’s electronic voting machines. And the Netherlands witnessed record turnout as voters dealt a blow to the populist party of Geert Wilders in elections in which all counting, tabulation and transmission of voters was done without the use of software.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 6-12 2017

While the the House Intelligence Committee negotiated an agreement with the nation’s intelligence agencies for full access to sensitive information gathered on interference in last year’s election, Democratic Senators used a confirmation hearing for Deputy Attorney General to urge the selection of a special prosecutor to examine the Trump administration’s potential ties to Russia. In the face of repeated requests, the nominee Rod Rosenstein refused to make any commitment.

In an NPR piece, Pam Fessler notes that although there has been little progress on the Administration’s investigation of voter fraud and states have found scant evidence of illegal voting in the 2016 election this has not deterred Republican legislators in many states from promoting voter id and other restrictive voting requirements.

One Democratic Senator joined the entire Republican caucus in the Arkansas Senate to reach by a one vote margin the two-thirds majority vote needed for passage of photo identification requirement. The day before the Senate had approved a proposed that cleared the way for a constitutional amendment to be placed on the November 2018 ballot. After hours of often contentious debate, the Iowa House passed a similar voter ID requirement on a typical party line vote and changes are being proposed to a voter id bill passed last year in the West Virginia legislature.

The FBI is investigating an alleged data breach in Georgia at the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University, The KSU Election Center is responsible for ensuring the integrity of the voting systems and developing and implementing security procedures for the election management software installed in all county election offices and voting systems. With closely-watched special elections scheduled in the coming months, it is than a bit troubling that closely-watched special elections scheduled for the coming months in Georgia will be held using DREs and e-pollbooks maintained and programmed by the KSU Center at the same time the center is subject to a criminal investigation.

A panel of federal judges ruled that a several of Texas congressional districts drawn by the Republican-dominated state Legislature in 2011 discriminated against black and Hispanic voters and violated the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. Richard Hasen has suggested that the ruling may provide a path for Texas to once again face ongoing federal supervision under the Voting Rights Act.

A group of academic experts has raised concerns about the security of an internet voting system proposed for use in Western Australia that uses a proxy service to provides protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, by placing itself between voters and the actual server.

The French government announced that it was cancelling plans to allow citizens abroad to vote over the Internet in legislative elections this June and the Netherlands is abandoning electronic vote counting ahead of their March 15 general election. Officials in both countries cited concerns over cybersecurity and foreign interference as reasons for abandoning electronic voting.

In a unanimous ruling, South Korea’s Constitutional Court formally removed impeached President Park Geun-hye from office over a corruption scandal. Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn has led the government as acting leader since Park’s impeachment and he will continue to do so until South Korea elects new president by May.