National: Internet Voting Is Becoming A Reality In Some States, Despite Cyber Fears | Miles Parks/NPR

For decades, the cybersecurity community has had a consistent message: Mixing the Internet and voting is a horrendous idea. “I believe that’s about the worst thing you can do in terms of election security in America, short of putting American ballot boxes on a Moscow street,” howled Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on the Senate floor this year. And yet, just a few years removed from Russia’s attack on democracy in the 2016 presidential election, and at a time of increased fear about election security, pockets of the U.S. are doing just that: experimenting with Internet voting as a means to increase turnout. Some experts are terrified. Others see the projects as necessary growth in an American voting system they call woefully stuck in a previous century. The number of people expected to vote this way in 2020 is still minuscule. But the company administering the system and advocates pushing for its use are open about wanting to fundamentally change the way Americans cast their ballots over the coming decade. The U.S. does not have a federalized election infrastructure. That means states and localities have the freedom to oversee voting how they see fit, with little oversight from the federal government. In some cases, that can lead to contradictory trends: At the same time some states implement same-day voter registration, others add more burdensome photo ID requirements. Voting technology is no different.

National: Smartphone Voting Could Expand Accessibility, But Election Experts Raise Security Concerns | Abigail Abrams/Time

ome voters with disabilities will be able to cast their ballots on smart phones using blockchain technology for the first time in a U.S. election on Tuesday. But while election officials and mobile voting advocates say the technology has the potential to increase access to the ballot box, election technology experts are raising serious security concerns about the idea. The mobile voting system, a collaboration between Boston-based tech company Voatz, nonprofit Tusk Philanthropies and the National Cybersecurity Center, has previously been used for some military and overseas voters during test pilots in West Virginia, Denver and Utah County, Utah. Now, Utah County is expanding its program to include voters with disabilities in its municipal general election as well. Two Oregon counties, Jackson and Umatilla, will also pilot the system for military and overseas voters on Tuesday. The idea, according to Bradley Tusk, the startup consultant and philanthropist who is funding the pilots, is to increase voter turnout. “We can’t take on every interest group in Washington around the country and beat them, but I think what we can do is let the genie out of the bottle,” he says.

National: New federal guidelines could ban internet in voting machines | Eric Geller/Politico

A long-awaited update to federal voting technology standards could ban voting machines from connecting to the internet or using any wireless technology such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. A new draft of version 2.0 of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines says that voting machines and ballot scanners “must not be capable of establishing wireless connections,” “establishing a connection to an external network” or “connecting to any device that is capable of establishing a connection to an external network.” If they survive a review process, the new rules would represent a landmark development in voting technology oversight, eliminating one of cybersecurity experts’ top concerns about voting machines by plugging holes that skilled hackers could exploit to tamper with the democratic process. The wireless and internet bans are included in the latest draft of the “system integrity” section of the VVSG update. A working group focused on the VVSG’s cybersecurity elements reviewed the document during an Oct. 29 teleconference.

UAE: E-voting technology adopted by UAE a pioneering experiment in the region | Samir Salama/Gulf News

By adopting an election protection system, the National Election Committee reiterates its commitment to hold an election that is characterised by the highest degree of fairness and transparency by implementing the best internationally recognised practices used in the world’s most successful parliaments, said Dr Anwar Mohammad Gargash, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Minister of State for Federal National Council Affairs and Chairman of the National Election Committee. Dr Gargash said on the eve of the early voting that starts today at nine polling stations across the country, the highly accurate e-voting technology adopted by the NEC is a pioneering experiment in the region, which the UAE introduced during the first Federal National Council Elections in 2006.

Utah: Mobile voting system used in Utah County subject of attempted 2018 West Virginia breach | Graham Dudley/KSL

The FBI is investigating an attempted intrusion of the Voatz mobile voting system during West Virginia’s 2018 midterm elections, officials announced last week, throwing a spotlight onto an experimental app that Utah County used for the first time in this year’s primary elections. Mike Stuart, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, said in a statement that there was “no intrusion and the integrity of votes and the election system was not compromised.” Stuart also said that the FBI investigation into the attempt is ongoing and that it’s still not determined whether any federal laws were violated. Voatz is a new technology allowing overseas voters, like missionaries and U.S. military personnel, an alternative to email or traditional mail-in voting, which have long sparked concerns over security and anonymity risks. It’s an app that uses blockchain technology, a sort of public digital ledger, to encrypt and secure votes.

West Virginia: The FBI is investigating West Virginia’s blockchain-based midterm elections | Matthew De Silva/Quartz

During the 2018 midterm elections, somebody tried to hack Voatz, the blockchain-based voting system used by West Virginia. The attack was unsuccessful, but is under investigation by the FBI, said Andrew Warner, West Virginia’s secretary of state in an Oct. 1 press conference. “In last year’s election, we detected activity that may have been an attempt to penetrate West Virginia’s mobile voting process,” said Warner. “No penetration occurred and the security protocols to protect our election process worked as designed. The IP addresses from which the attempts were made have been turned over to the FBI for investigation. The investigation will determine if crimes were committed.” The hacking attempt may have stemmed from an election security class at the University of Michigan, CNN reported Friday (Oct. 4). Last November, 144 West Virginian voters—including active members of the US military serving overseas—used Boston-based Voatz, a blockchain-enabled smartphone application, to cast their ballots for the Senate and House of Representatives as well as for state and local offices. That’s a small number, but could be consequential, especially in close races. Four seats in West Virginia’s House of Delegates were decided by less than 150 votes.

West Virginia: Alleged mobile voting app hack linked to University of Michigan | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

Federal investigators looking into an alleged hacking attempt against the mobile app that West Virginia officials used to collect ballots from overseas voters in the 2018 election are determining if the incident was the result of computer-science students at the University of Michigan testing for vulnerabilities. CNN reported Friday that the FBI is investigating “a person or people” who attempted to access the app — Voatz — as part of a cybersecurity course at University of Michigan, which is one of a handful of universities with a curriculum focused on election security. Mike Stuart, the U.S. attorney for West Virginia, revealed the investigation last Tuesday, saying that during the 2018 election cycle his office was alerted by West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner that there was an “attempted intrusion by an outside party” to access the Voatz app. According to state officials and the app’s developers, Voatz is designed only to grant ballot access to qualified voters who go through multiple layers of biometric identification, including facial-recognition and fingerprint scanning.

West Virginia: Hackers try to access West Virginia’s mobile voting app | GCN

Someone tried to hack into West Virginia’s blockchain-enabled mobile voting system during the 2018 election cycle. The attack happened during the pilot rollout of West Virginia’s mobile voting pilot that uses a smartphone application developed by Boston-based Voatz to enable eligible overseas voters to receive and return their ballot securely using a mobile device. The app lets military and overseas voters who qualify under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Act verify their identities by providing biometric proof in the form of a photo of their driver’s license, state ID or passport that is matched to a selfie. Once voters’ identities are confirmed, they receive a mobile ballot based on the one that they would receive in their local precinct. A confirmation message is sent to the voter’s smartphone when the vote is uploaded to the blockchain’s series of secure, redundant, geographically dispersed servers , which ensures the votes cannot be tampered with once they’ve been recorded.

West Virginia: Hacking attempt reported against West Virginia’s mobile voting app | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

The FBI is investigating an alleged hacking attempt against the mobile app that West Virginia officials used to collect ballots from some overseas voters during the 2018 election cycle, the Justice Department announced Tuesday. Mike Stuart, the U.S. attorney for West Virginia, said that during last year’s election cycle, his office received a report from West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner pertaining to an “attempted intrusion by an outside party” to access the app, Voatz, which Warner’s office has heralded as the future of voting for expat U.S. citizens, especially deployed members of the military. The attempt, Stuart continued, appeared to be unsuccessful, with no actual intrusion or effect on the 144 ballots that were cast in last year’s general election. “No penetration occurred and the security protocols to protect our election process worked as designed,” Warner said at a press conference Tuesday in Charleston, the state capital. Still, Warner said, the attempted intrusion was referred to the FBI for investigation as a “deterrent” against attempts by outside actors to interfere with the state’s election process.

West Virginia: Attempted hack of military app investigated | Steve Allen Adams/The Intermountain

Federal and state officials announced this week an FBI investigation into an attempted hack on the new app for overseas deployed military voters and their families and warned others not to make the attempt. Mike Stuart, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, and Secretary of State Mac Warner held a press conference at the Robert C. Byrd Courthouse in downtown Charleston. According to Warner, there was an attempt to hack the Secure Military Voting Application during the 2018 elections. The mobile app allows deployed military and their families to download an app and vote for candidates after they apply to use the app and are approved. “In last year’s election, we detected activity that may have been an attempt to penetrate West Virginia’s mobile voting process,” Warner said. “No penetration occurred and the security protocols to protect our election process worked as designed.” During the mobile voting process, the virtual ballot is encrypted and secured utilizing blockchain technology, then sent to the voter’s county clerk in West Virginia where their ballot is printed and tabulated. West Virginia was the first state to use mobile voting, first in a pilot project during the 2018 primary election, then a full rollout for any county that wanted to participate in the 2018 general election.

West Virginia: FBI called in to investigate 2018 Mountain State mobile voting system hacking | Shaun Nichols/The Register

The state of West Virginia says someone attempted to hack its citizens’ votes during the 2018 mid-term elections. A statement issued this week by US Attorney Mike Stuart of the Southern District of West Virginia revealed that the FBI has been called in and is actively investigating at least one attempt to tamper with election results. “My office instituted an investigation to determine the facts and whether any federal laws were violated. The FBI has led that investigation,” Stuart said. “That investigation is currently ongoing and no legal conclusions whatsoever have been made regarding the conduct of the activity or whether any federal laws were violated.” According to the US attorney, the unknown hacker, only referred to as an ‘outside party’ tried (and failed) to get access to the mobile voting system the state used for military service members stationed overseas.

Canada: Online voting in Northwest Territories election questioned as recounts set to take place | Hilary Bird/CBC

With two recounts set to take place in the next 10 days, one candidate in Tuesday’s Northwest Territories election says he has some concerns with how online votes will be recounted. Under the Elections and Plebiscite Act of the Northwest Territories, races that won with a margin of less than two per cent must have judicial recounts within 10 days of the official results being released. That means ballots cast in the Frame Lake and Yellowknife North ridings will all need to be recounted by a judge. Rylund Johnson won in Yellowknife North by just five votes over incumbent Cory Vanthuyne. Johnson got 501 votes; Vanthuyne received 496. In Yellowknife’s Frame Lake riding, incumbent Kevin O’Reilly won by a slim margin with 357 votes. The riding’s only other candidate, former minister Dave Ramsay, received 346 votes. Ramsay told CBC News Wednesday that he has already seen discrepancies between unofficial numbers reported by Elections NWT Tuesday evening and numbers reported Wednesday morning after returning officers double-checked the polls.

Mexico: Mexicans living abroad could cast their vote online for the first time in 2021 | Alexandra Mendoza/The San Diego Union-Tribune

Mexicans living abroad could cast their vote online as soon as the 2021 midterm elections. For almost 15 years, voters wanting to participate in Mexican elections from outside the country voted by mail. The new process of voting online will have to go through several tests to make sure it is error free, according to Enrique Andrade, a counselor with Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE). “It’s not something simple,” he said during a recent visit to San Diego. “It’s going to depend a lot on the trust in the system”. In the 2018 elections, about 182,000 Mexicans registered to vote from abroad and 54 percent cast their ballots. In 2012, almost 60,000 Mexicans registered to vote, with 69 percent participating in the election. Last year was the third time that Mexicans were allowed to vote from abroad, but the first one in which they could apply for the credential to vote in the consulate.

West Virginia: FBI investigating attempted breach of Voatz mobile voting app | Mark Albert/WTAE

One or more people tried to penetrate West Virginia’s mobile voting system during the Midterm election, the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit has confirmed, leading to new worries about the security of certain election platforms ahead of next year’s general election. The Mountain State was the first to use mobile voting for military and overseas voters. Tuesday’s announcement in the state capital of Charleston by state and federal authorities of the attempted breach came on the first day of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, Mike Stuart, says the case has now been turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for investigation. Sources tell the National Investigative Unit the attempted intrusion of the mobile voting app is believed to have come from inside the U.S., not from overseas. At a news conference Tuesday afternoon at the federal courthouse in Charleston, Stuart delivered a warning to anyone who may attempt to breach an election system. “Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. We’re serious about maintaining the integrity of our election system and we will prosecute those folks who violate federal law,” Stuart said.

National: Blockchain e-voting: Backed by US candidate, hacked in Moscow | Sarah Wray/SmartCitiesWorld

The debate over blockchain-based political voting re-emerged recently as Democratic US presidential hopeful Andrew Yang backs the technology to boost voter numbers and security, while a French researcher has hacked into the blockchain-based voting system which officials plan to use next month for the 2019 Moscow City Duma election. On his campaign website, Yang states that voting should be available via mobile devices with verification through blockchain. He argues that modernising voting with decentralised ledger technology could increase security, reduce inconsistent processes between states and restore confidence in democracy. Philip Boucher, a European Policy Research Service (EPRS) policy analyst, explains the theory behind blockchain voting: “In elections, we usually have a central authority that records, checks and counts all of the votes. With blockchain, the process is decentralised so everyone can hold a copy of the full voting record on their own devices. The data is encrypted to protect the identity of individual voters. Illegitimate votes cannot be added and the historical record cannot be changed because everyone holds a copy and can check that all of the votes comply with the rules and are counted properly.” Some have even suggested that in future, blockchain votes could be encoded into ‘smart contracts’ so that the results automatically take effect “like a self-implementing manifesto”. Several countries and local authorities have explored or experimented with the idea of digital voting.

Estonia: E-voting workgroup recommends more audits and observers | ERR

Experts put forward suggestions and recommendations at the second meeting of the e-election working group on Wednesday, commissioned by minister Kert Kingo (EKRE). Over the past month, committee members have submitted 30 suggestions for improvements. At the second meeting suggested proposals were put forward in three areas. Head of the working group Raul Rikk said that firstly more resources should be made available so that several independent auditors can check the processes of e-voting. He said this would increase their credibility in Estonia and around the world. The group is also proposing that the number of people involved in conducting and supervising elections should increase and to raise the number of independent observers at election counts. Rikk said this could be done, for example, by making it obligatory for a representative from each political party to attend the election counts. Experts could also be invited to follow the process or IT students could be encouraged to write reports. These changes would help to increase the number of people in society who have received training in the electoral process and understand the structure of the system, Rikk said.

Italy: The Five Star digital voting platform that could threaten a government deal in Italy | Franck Iovene/AFP

If Italy’s political parties can agree on a government deal, it would still need to clear a final hurdle: the online voting platform of the Five Star Movement (M5S), which has long championed so-called ‘digital democracy’.
The platform, named after the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is supposed not only to empower ordinary citizens but guarantee transparency — but it has been slammed as secretive and vulnerable to cyber attacks. Launched in 2016, it currently has some 100,000 members, M5S chief Luigi Di Maio said in July. But critics have lamented a lack of official documentation or certification from a third party to attest that this figure is correct. The M5S’s blog says the number of people registered on “Rousseau” rose from 135,000 in October 2016 to nearly 150,000 in August 2017, before dropping to 100,000 a year later. But political analysts say it cannot be seen as representative of M5S supporters, as the membership numbers are a drop in the ocean compared to the 10.7 million Italians who voted for M5S in the 2018 general election.

Australia: Where’s the proof internet voting is secure? | Vanessa Teague/Pursuit

Victoria’s Electoral Commissioner, Warwick Gately AM, says that Victoria should legislate to allow Internet voting because “there is an inevitability about remote electronic voting over the internet.” According to Mr Gately, the NSW iVote system has, “proven the feasibility of casting a secret vote safely and securely over the internet”. The key word here is “proven”. Anyone can claim that their system is secure and protects people’s privacy, but how would we know? Elections have special requirements. Ballot privacy is mandated by law. And elections must demonstrate that the result accurately reflects the choice of the people. So, what has iVote proven? In 2015, our team found that the iVote site was vulnerable to an internet-based attacker who could read and manipulate votes. The attack wouldn’t have raised any security warnings at either the voter’s or the NSW Electoral Commission (NSWEC) end, but it should have been apparent from iVote’s telephone-based verification. When the NSWEC claimed that “some 1.7 per cent of electors who voted using iVote® also used the verification service and none of them identified any anomalies with their vote,” we took that as reasonable evidence that the security problem hadn’t been exploited. But it wasn’t true.

Russia: Moscow’s blockchain-based internet voting system uses an encryption scheme that can be easily broken | Sugandha Lahoti/Security Boulevard

Russia is looking forward to its September 2019 elections for the representatives at the Parliament of the city (the Moscow City Douma). For the first time ever, Russia will use Internet voting in its elections. The internet-based system will use blockchain developed in-house by the Moscow Department of Information Technology. Since the news broke out, security experts have been quite skeptical about the overall applicability of blockchain to elections. Recently, a French security researcher Pierrick Gaudry has found a critical vulnerability in the encryption scheme used in the coding of the voting system. The scheme used was the ElGamal encryption, which is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm for public-key cryptography. Gaudry revealed that it can be broken in about 20 minutes using a standard personal computer and using only free software that is publicly available. The main problem, Gaudry says is in the choice of three cyclic groups of generators. These generators are multiplicative groups of finite fields of prime orders each of them being Sophie Germain primes. These prime fields are all less than 256-bit long and the 256×3 private key length is too little to guarantee strong security. Discrete logarithms in such a small setting can be computed in a matter of minutes, thus revealing the secret keys, and subsequently easily decrypting the encrypted data. Gaudry also showed that the implemented version of ElGamal worked in groups of even order, which means that it leaked a bit of the message. What an attacker can do with these encryption keys is currently unknown, since the voting system’s protocols weren’t yet available in English, so Gaudry couldn’t investigate further.

Russia: Prominent journalist Alexey Venediktov has accused ‘Meduza’ of cheating to prove Moscow’s online voting system is hackable. He’s wrong. | Mikhail Zelenskiy/Meduza

This September’s elections for the Moscow City Duma have already gained renown for inspiring regular mass protests, but they are also remarkable for another reason: In three of the Russian capital’s districts, voters will be able to use an online system to select their new representatives. Moscow’s Information Technology Department held intrusion tests on GitHub in late July to verify the integrity of the system: Officials gave programmers several opportunities to attempt to decrypt mock voting data, and each round of data was subsequently published so that it could be compared to the results of those hacking attempts. On August 16, Meduza reported on French cryptographer Pierrick Gaudry’s successful attempt to break through the system’s encryption. To confirm that the encryption keys used in the system are too weak, we also implemented Gaudry’s program ourselves. City Hall officials responded to the successful hackings by refusing to post its private keys and data, thereby preventing outsiders from confirming that the system had indeed been hacked. Instead, Ekho Moskvy Editor-in-Chief Alexey Venediktov, who is also leading the citizens’ board responsible for the elections, accused Meduza of abusing the testing process. Here’s why he’s wrong.

Switzerland: Swiss post rolls out more secure version of e-voting platform | SWI

The publicly-owned company Swiss Post, which had abandoned its electronic voting system in July over security concerns, has developed a new version. “We have already proposed a solution” to cantons, said general manager Roberto Cirillo in an interview published by the La Liberté newspaper on Friday. According to Cirillo, the company is in the process of defining the rules for testing the new system with cantons. He stressed that the new version will “contain universal verifiability”. At the beginning of July, Swiss Post abandoned its electronic voting system, which means it now cannot be used for the October federal parliamentary elections. The decision was made after subjecting the e-voting system to an intrusion test by thousands of hackers last spring. According to Swiss Post, they were unable to penetrate the electronic ballot box, but found serious errors in the source code, which had to be corrected. The cantons of Neuchâtel, Fribourg, Thurgau and Basel City had adopted this e-voting system, which only offered individual verifiability. Three of them already plan to demand compensation from Swiss Post for failure to deliver.

Russia: Moscow’s blockchain voting system cracked a month before election | Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet

A French security researcher has found a critical vulnerability in the blockchain-based voting system Russian officials plan to use next month for the 2019 Moscow City Duma election. Pierrick Gaudry, an academic at Lorraine University and a researcher for INRIA, the French research institute for digital sciences, found that he could compute the voting system’s private keys based on its public keys. This private keys are used together with the public keys to encrypt user votes cast in the election. Gaudry blamed the issue on Russian officials using a variant of the ElGamal encryption scheme that used encryption key sizes that were too small to be secure. This meant that modern computers could break the encryption scheme within minutes. “It can be broken in about 20 minutes using a standard personal computer, and using only free software that is publicly available,” Gaudry said in a report published earlier this month. “Once these [private keys] are known, any encrypted data can be decrypted as quickly as they are created,” he added.

Russia: Blockchain Voting System in Moscow Municipal Elections Vulnerable to Hacking: Research Report | Trevor Holman/CryptoNewsZ

A recent research report by a French cryptographer demonstrates that a blockchain voting framework utilized in Moscow’s municipal elections is susceptible to hacking. The researcher at the French government research establishment CNRS, Pierrick Gaudry, have examined the open code of the e-voting platform dependent on Ethereum in his paper. Gaudry inferred that the encryption plan utilized by a portion of the code is “totally insecure.” The research report titled, “Breaking the encryption scheme of the Moscow internet voting system” by Pierrick Gaudry, a researcher from CNRS, French governmental scientific institution had examined the encryption plan used to verify the open code of the Moscow city government’s Ethereum-based platform for e-voting. Gaudry concluded that the encryption scheme utilized by a portion of the code is entirely insecure by clarifying –

We will show in this note that the encryption scheme used in this part of the code is completely insecure. It can be broken in about 20 minutes using a standard personal computer and using only free software that is publicly available. More precisely, it is possible to compute the private keys from the public keys. Once these are known, any encrypted data can be decrypted as quickly as they are created.

National: Why blockchain-based voting could threaten democracy | Lucas Mearian/Computerworld

Public tests of blockchain-based mobile voting are growing. Even as there’s been an uptick in pilot projects, security experts warn that blockchain-based mobile voting technology is innately insecure and potentially a danger to democracy through “wholesale fraud” or “manipulation tactics.” The topic of election security has been in the spotlight recently after Congress held classified…

Ukraine: Zelensky’s team working on internet voting in Ukraine | Unian

The team of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is working on a project that will allow Ukrainians to vote online during elections. “We have already ‘The Vote’ project,” Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview to Liga.net. According to him, at the first stage, the platform will be used for surveys, thanks to which the president, prime minister and others will learn the real opinion of the population. The identification system in this project is implemented through Mobile ID, electronic signature, BankID. Fedorov assures Ukrainians will be able to vote online in elections in 2024.

Iowa: “Virtual Iowa Caucuses” Demand Cybersecurity Attention: 2020 Election Security Can’t Wait Till 2020 | Joshua Geltzer/Just Security

The past week featured stark reminders of the importance of election security as the 2020 presidential election swiftly approaches. First, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified to the House Intelligence Committee that the Russian government was interfering with American democracy “as we sit here.” Next, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a detailed report on election security, reciting the extensive malign cyber activity conducted by Moscow in the lead-up to America’s 2016 presidential election and concluding that “little has been done to prevent it from happening all over again.” Press coverage of both of these warnings has emphasized—understandably—the need to harden U.S. defenses against various forms of cyber interference that Russia—and now Iran, too—appear intent on carrying out in the 2020 election. While it’s true that 2020 election security is critical, it’s important to emphasize that protecting our elections can’t wait until 2020 is upon us. That’s because, if our foreign adversaries’ goal is (as the Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed) to undermine American confidence in our own democracy, the opportunities to do so are already unfolding. Long before Election Day arrives, the release of internal campaign emails, the distortion of public polling data, the laundering to campaigns of money that originates from impermissible sources—all of this can contribute to advancing the objectives of Russia and other hostile foreign actors intent on undermining public confidence in American elections and, ultimately, our democracy.

West Virginia: Internet Voting Experiment Criticized | Public News Service

Security experts are critical of a West Virginia experiment in Internet voting for military and overseas citizens. Last year the Secretary of State’s office allowed 141 West Virginians in 31 counties to vote, using what’s known as blockchain – the same distributed ledger system cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin use. In an article for Slate magazine, tech reporter Yael Grauer criticized the contractor for being secretive. Among other points, Grauer also questioned whether the use of blockchain really helped secure the voting, or if the experiment just used a fad technology as a kind of marketing. And Grauer pointed to a weak link. “Everybody who’s sent email probably knows that they don’t always go through,” she points out. “And after they receive it they’re putting it on the blockchain, but there’s no way for voters to be able to check whether what they voted on is in the blockchain the way that they voted on it.”

Australia: New South Wales iVote source code released for researchers to poke around in | Asha Barbaschow/ZDNet

Parts of the source code the New South Wales Electoral Commission (NSWEC) uses to conduct voting has been released, in a bid to prove it contains no vulnerabilities. Scytl, who was awarded a multi-year contract to refresh the NSW online and phone voting software also known as iVote, has on Tuesday made the code available to those that register, at the request of the NSWEC. “We have published the source code to allow independent researchers to review it in order to aid continuous improvement of the code base by finding and communicating any vulnerabilities they may find,” Scytl Asia-Pacific GM Sam Campbell said. “The terms of use are published with the source code and stipulate that any vulnerabilities discovered must be reported to Scytl and the NSW Electoral Commission.” In early March, a group of researchers found a flaw in the Swiss Internet voting system, which is the same system used by NSWEC. The flaw was found in the proof the SwissPost system uses to prevent electoral fraud. Later that month, researchers detailed a second flaw in the electronic voting system, discovering another method that could be exploited to result in a tampered election outcome.

Switzerland: Cyber attack hits email users probing Russian intelligence | Sam Jones/Financial Times

One of the world’s most secure email services has been caught up in a sophisticated cyber attack aimed at investigative journalists and other experts who are probing Russian intelligence activities. Those targeted have used Swiss-based ProtonMailexternal link to share sensitive information related to their probes of Moscow’s military intelligence directorate, the GRU. Its agents have been accused of complicity in the downing of MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, and the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter last year in Britain. ProtonMail, which bills itself as the world’s most secure email platform, because of its cutting edge cryptography and protections against attack, became aware of the attempt to compromise its users on Wednesday. The company, founded in 2014 by a team of former scientists from the European particle research laboratory CERNexternal link, has been in touch with Swiss authorities to help shut down the web domains used to try to dupe its clients and has taken action to block phishing emails. Its own systems and servers have not been hit in any way, it emphasised.

Iowa: Press 1 for Harris. Press 2 for Biden …’Tele-voting’ comes to the presidential race | Alex Seitz-Wald/MBC

You can phone it in. For the first time, Democrats in Iowa and Nevada will be able to participate in their states’ crucial early presidential caucuses next year without actually having to show up. It’s a major change from election years past and one designed to make the Democratic caucuses more democratic and boost participation since not everyone has the time or ability to spend several hours of a specific evening attending an in-person caucus meeting. “This has been one of the challenges and criticisms that people have had of the Iowa caucuses since they were created,” Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, told NBC News. “So we’ve always been looking for ways to address this.” Both Iowa and Nevada will now allow any Democrat who wants to to use a telephone to dial into a “virtual caucus,” where they’ll rank a handful of their choices for the presidency. Iowa will offer Democrats six chances to “tele-caucus” in the days leading up to its Feb. 3 first-in-the-nation caucus. “We wanted a process that would continue to allow the precincts to remain the central tenant of our caucuses, while allowing some people who might not otherwise be able to to participate,” Price said.