Utah: Elections office fills in blank ovals on ballots | Daily Herald

While this year’s elections have seen some interesting twists, one of the most problematic could be the printed stickers used by those voting for Provo mayoral write-in candidate, Odell Miner. In a generous move, Miner had transparent stickers printed with his name and a filled-in voting oval or bubble to affix to the mail-in ballot in the hopes of making things easier for those voting for him. Bryan Thompson, Utah County clerk/auditor, was uneasy about Miner using the stickers in case a reading machine got jammed or had some other problem. However, Thompson said he couldn’t stop Miner from doing it either. “I told Odell you may not see all of your count,” Thompson said.

Georgia: Attorney General Quits Representing Election Officials In Lawsuit After Server Wiped | Associated Press

The Georgia attorney general’s office will no longer represent state election officials in an elections integrity lawsuit in which a crucial computer server was quietly wiped clean three days after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned. The lawsuit aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized touchscreen election technology, which does not provide an auditable paper trail. The server in question was a statewide staging location for key election-related data. It made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed for six months after he first reported it to election authorities. Personal data was exposed for Georgia’s 6.7 million voters as were passwords used by county officials to access files. The assistant state attorney general handling the case, Cristina Correia, notified the court and participating attorneys Wednesday that her office was withdrawing from the case, according to an email obtained by the AP. Spokeswoman Katelyn McCreary offered no explanation and said she couldn’t comment “on pending matters.”

Georgia: Former Gov. Roy Barnes’ firm to represent Georgia in lawsuit | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Former Gov. Roy Barnes’ law firm will represent Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp in a lawsuit that a national election transparency advocacy group filed to force the state to overhaul its election system. The Department of Administrative Services has replaced Attorney General Christopher Carr with Barnes Law Group to represent Kemp, the state Election Board and others named in the case, Kemp spokeswoman Candice Broce said. The Charlotte-based Coalition for Good Governance, led by Executive Director Marilyn Marks, has said that reported security lapses show the state’s system is “vulnerable and unreliable” and should not have been used for the 6th Congressional District runoff race in June — nor should it be used in next week’s election. Kennesaw State University runs the Center for Elections Systems and is also a defendant in the lawsuit. …  KSU said the server that had been examined by the FBI was wiped so it could be repurposed, and that the FBI had a copy of the data that were on the server.

Georgia: Group calls for state to abandon voting system in next week’s election | Atlanta Journal Constitution

The executive director of a national election transparency advocacy group has written an open letter to Georgia lawmakers urging them not to use the state’s current voting system in next week’s election. Marilyn Marks, executive director with the Coalition for Good Governance, said that she believes the state’s voting system is compromised and election workers should instead begin using paper ballots in the Nov. 7 elections. The Charlotte-based group is suing the state to force it to overhaul its election technology. Marks’ letter comes a few days after it became public that a databank maintained by the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University was erased in July. “The disclosures of the last several days expose the fact that the voting system is compromised and cannot be relied on to produce accurate results,” Marks wrote in her letter.

Georgia: Kennesaw State Says Elections Server Was Wiped After FBI Gave Clearance | WABE

Kennesaw State University says a computer server holding state election data was wiped clean after copies of it were made by the FBI and the agency told KSU its investigation into a possible hack was complete. A group suing the state, charging Georgia’s voting system is outdated and not secure, says KSU erased the server in July after its lawsuit was filed. The group says data on the server may have revealed whether state elections were hacked. “This was not accidental. This was something that was conducted with purpose to make sure that the information could never be recovered again,” said Richard DeMillo, a computing professor at Georgia Tech who has been closely watching the case.

Georgia: Incompetence or a Cover-Up? Georgia destroyed election data right after a lawsuit alleged the system was vulnerable. | Slate

On July 3, state voters and a good-government group filed a lawsuit alleging that Georgia officials ignored warnings that the state’s electoral system was extremely susceptible to hacking. On July 4, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office was alerted about the lawsuit by the press and declined to comment. It received a copy of the suit on July 6. And on July 7, Georgia officials deleted the state’s election data, which would have likely been critical evidence in that lawsuit, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Two things could have happened here. Either it was an incredible act of incompetence on the part of Georgia’s election officials, or it was an attempted cover-up to try to hide from the public a major election security lapse. Lawmakers from both parties are calling for heads to roll.

Editorials: Georgia’s voting system – Outrageous security lapse | SavannahNow

The fact that the state university housing the servers that are at the center of a case over the security of Georgia’s election system wiped them clean of all data is both an outrage and extremely suspicious. If a pending state investigation into this breach at the Center for Elections System at Kennesaw State University shows that laws were broken, then Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr shouldn’t hesitate to file charges. The sanctity of Georgia’s ballot box and its elections records must be protected. Our democracy is based on free and fair elections. The public must have confidence that the process is safe and secure. According to The Hill newspaper in Washington, the servers in question had been in the possession of the Center for Elections System, which runs Georgia’s election system on a contract basis. On July 3, a diverse group of election reform advocates filed suit, alleging that Georgia’s election system was flawed and could potentially be rigged. The plaintiffs want to scrap the state’s 15-year-old vote-management system, particularly its 27,000 AccuVote touchscreen voting screens, which are used in Chatham County and elsewhere, that don’t employ paper ballots or keep hardcopy proof of how voters voted. They allege these machines are hackable.

Georgia: Georgia Wiped Its Election Server While Advocates Fought for Security Investigation | Gizmodo

A server that held data central to Georgia’s elections was wiped this summer, destroying the potential for a forensic investigation to determine whether or not the server was compromised by hackers, the AP reports. The data destruction was revealed in an email last week from an associate state attorney general to a group that is suing Georgia in an attempt to force additional security measures into the election system. The lawsuit was filed on July 3rd and data was reportedly destroyed on July 7th. In August, backups of the wiped server were also destroyed. “The lawsuit was filed, and right after the lawsuit was filed, they wiped their server. After it was moved to federal court, they did it again,” Marian Schneider, the president of Verified Voting, an organization that advocates for election security and has worked with the group of Georgia advocates involved in the lawsuit, told Gizmodo.

Georgia: Probe underway in destruction of data on election system server | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said Thursday that his office is launching an investigation after data was quietly destroyed on a computer server shortly after a lawsuit was filed seeking to force the state to overhaul its election technology. The data wipe, first reported by The Associated Press, was revealed in an email sent by a state prosecutor to lawyers representing election transparency advocates who filed the lawsuit in July questioning the security and accuracy of Georgia’s election infrastructure. The documents show the destruction of the data occurred July 7 at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The director of the center referred questions Thursday to Kennesaw State’s press office. The KSU center’s system will be used in the upcoming elections. KSU represenattives late Thursday issued a statement explaining that the server, which had been examined by the FBI, was wiped so it could be repurposed. School spokeswoman Tammy DeMel said in the statement the FBI made a copy of all of the data on the server before informing KSU it had not been compromised and returning the technology. DeMel said the university determined the technology on the server had exceeded its life and erased the data to repurpose the device.

California: San Luis Obispo County voting won’t change due to cyber security | The Tribune

Citing concerns about election cyber security, San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Tommy Gong has decided to keep neighborhood polling places with an option to vote by mail in 2018, opting out of a state test of an all-vote-by-mail system. Gong said the new model that also would have included a handful of voting centers to be open for multiple days — and expected to increase voter participation and save money — may be implemented for the presidential primaries in March 2020. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill to modernize California elections a year ago. Fourteen counties, including San Luis Obispo, were offered a chance to participate in 2018. So far, Sacramento, Nevada, Napa and San Mateo counties decided to make the switch, according to the State Secretary of State Office.

Georgia: Lawmakers begin discussion of replacing voting machines | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A handful of lawmakers began the discussion Friday about what it might take to move Georgia to a new election system, an important but incremental step toward replacing the state’s aging voting machines. The meeting of the state House Science and Technology Committee represents a start. Any decision will likely take a few years and, depending on the type of system officials pick, could cost more than $100 million. Cheaper options are available, but the state’s leaders all need to agree on what they want. “We all want to have a system that is best in class and does all the things technology can provide for us,” said committee Chairman Ed Setzler, R-Acworth. Beginning that conversation now, he added, means the “committee starts out of session to look at these things and to look at what technological options can serve our state well.” Georgia’s current system, considered state-of-the-art when it was adopted 15 years ago, is now universally acknowledged by experts to be vulnerable to security risks and buggy software. Only a handful of states still use similar electronic systems, which voters know for their digital touch screens. A majority — 41 states — either have or are moving toward voting done entirely on paper or on a hybrid system that incorporates some kind of paper trail.

Verified Voting in the News: Board of Elections Ends Use of Touch-Screen Voting Machines | Wall Street Journal

Election administrators in Virginia ordered the state’s remaining touch-screen electronic voting machines be taken out of service in advance of the coming statewide election, after hackers demonstrated vulnerabilities in an array of election technology at a recent security convention. Virginia, one of two states holding statewide elections for governor and state legislature this year, won’t use any touch-screen machines in the Nov. 7 general election after the State Board of Elections voted Friday to revoke the certifications on all such systems still being used in the state. Virginia will switch to paper ballots counted and processed by computerized scanners. James Alcorn, chair of the board, said in a statement the move was “necessary to ensure the integrity of Virginia’s elections.” … The decision by Virginia to stop using touch-screen electronic voting machines marks a victory for advocates who have long criticized paperless electronic voting systems as insecure and potentially vulnerable to tampering and mischief.

Verified Voting in the News: Board of Elections halts use of voting machines considered vulnerable to hacking | Reuters

Virginia on Friday agreed to stop using paperless touchscreen voting machines that had been flagged by cyber security experts as potentially vulnerable to hackers and lacking sufficient vote auditing capabilities. The action represented one of the most concrete steps taken by a U.S. state to bolster the cyber security of election systems since the 2016 presidential race, when U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia waged a digital influence campaign to help President Donald Trump win. Virginia’s board of elections voted to accept a recommendation from its state election director, Edgardo Cortes, to decertify so-called direct-recording electronic machines, which count votes digitally and do not produce paper trails that can be checked against a final result.

Virginia: Virginia Is Getting Rid of Its Vulnerable Voting Machines | Gizmodo

Virginia’s Board of Elections voted unanimously to decertify all of the state’s touchscreen voting machines, which are considered by cybersecurity experts to be vulnerable to manipulation by hackers. The race is now on to replace the machines, which are used in 22 counties, before Virginia’s elections in November. Industry experts and and the state’s elections department have recommended that the touchscreen machines be replaced with ones that record votes on paper instead of only electronically, so the votes can be audited and verified.

Virginia: Board of Elections bans touch-screen voting machines over hacking concerns | Associated Press

The Virginia State Board of Elections voted Friday to ban use of touch-screen voting machines in November’s closely watched gubernatorial contest, over concerns the equipment can be hacked. The three-person board voted unanimously at a hastily arranged meeting to decertify touch-screen voting machines, which are still used by counties and cities around the state. The vote came after a closed-door briefing on potential vulnerabilities to the touch-screen systems. “It was enlightening, to say the least,” said board member Clara Belle Wheeler, who said she had originally intended not vote for decertification because of the closeness to the Nov. 7 elections.

Virginia: In emergency meeting, Virginia elections board votes to scrap all touch-screen voting machines | Richmond Times-Dispatch

The Virginia State Board of Elections voted Friday to discontinue use of all touch-screen voting machines throughout the state because of potential security vulnerabilities, forcing 22 cities and counties to scramble to find new equipment just weeks before voting begins for the November gubernatorial election. Behind closed doors at an emergency meeting in Richmond on Friday afternoon, the board heard about specific vulnerabilities identified after a cybersecurity conference this summer in Las Vegas, where hackers showed they could break into voting machines with relative ease. After the July Defcon conference, Virginia’s Department of Elections asked the state’s IT agency to review the security of touch screens still in use in the state. Details of that review were kept confidential, but they caused the elections board to speed up the end of touch screens, which were already scheduled to be phased out of Virginia elections by 2020.

Alaska: State weighing options for conducting elections | Associated Press

The state of Alaska is exploring options for conducting elections after 2018, as it is faced with an aging voting system and financial pressures amid an ongoing state budget deficit. A bipartisan working group established by Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott is examining the issue. Josie Bahnke, director of the state Division of Elections, said one option that has gotten attention is a hybrid system would include allowing for early, in-person voting and voting by mail. But she said discussions are preliminary and more research must be done to see if this approach would work in Alaska, a vast state with far-flung communities. In certain parts of Alaska, the state must provide language assistance, including for a number of Alaska Native languages and dialects.

Georgia: Election hacking suit over Georgia race could be sign of what’s to come | USA Today

First elections, then probes into hacking. Now, the lawsuits over election hacking. A group of Democrat and Republican voters in Georgia is suing the state to overturn its fiercely fought June special election, saying evidence the state’s voter database was exposed to potential hackers for at least eight months invalidates the results. The lawsuit, which went to pre-trial conferences this week, could be a sign of disputes to come as revelations mount about the vulnerability of the U.S. election system and Russian attempts to infiltrate it. “As public attention finally starts to focus on the cybersecurity of election systems, we will see more suits like this one, and eventually, a woke judge will invalidate an election,” said Bruce McConnell, vice president of the EastWest Institute and former Department of Homeland Security deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity during the Obama administration. Plaintiffs argue the disclosure in August 2016 by Logan Lamb, a Georgia-based computer security expert, that much of Georgia’s voting system was inadvertently left out in the open on the Internet without password protection from August 2016 to March 2017 should make the results moot. What’s more, Georgia’s use of what the plaintiffs say are insecure touch-screen voting computers, which they claim don’t comply with Georgia state requirements for security testing, means the election results couldn’t legally be certified, they say.

Georgia: Thousands of voting machines in limbo because of 6th District lawsuit | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Thousands of voting machines from the hotly contested 6th Congressional District special election are currently off-limits for future use because of a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the results. That worries metro Atlanta officials who say they could be short of spare machines to run municipal elections in November. The suit, filed over the July 4 holiday, demands that Republican Karen Handel’s win in a June 20 runoff be thrown out and the contest redone over concerns some election integrity advocates have about the security and accuracy of Georgia’s election infrastructure. The machines and related hardware are central to that system, and the three metro counties with areas in the 6th District — Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton — have stored the machines used in the special election after plaintiffs sought to preserve electronic records that could have bearing on the suit.

Tennessee: Personal Info of 650,000 Voters Discovered on Electronic Poll Book Sold on Ebay | Gizmodo

When 650 thousand Tennesseans voted in the Memphis area, they probably didn’t expect their personal information would eventually be picked apart at a hacker conference at Caesars Palace Las Vegas. … When US government workers decommission old voting equipment and auction them off to the public, they’re supposed to wipe voter information from the device’s memory. But hackers given access to an ExpressPoll-5000 electronic poll book—the kind of device used to check in voters on Election Day—have discovered the personal records of 654,517 people who voted in Shelby Country, Tennessee. It’s unclear how much of the personal information wasn’t yet public. Some of the records, viewed by Gizmodo at the Voting Village, a collection of real, used voting machines that anyone could tinker with at the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas, include not just name, address, and birthday, but also political party, whether they voted absentee, and whether they were asked to provide identification. 

National: Hackers breach each of dozens voting machines brought to conference | The Hill

One of the nation’s largest cybersecurity conferences is inviting attendees to get hands-on experience hacking a slew of voting machines, demonstrating to researchers how easy the process can be. “It took me only a few minutes to see how to hack it,” said security consultant Thomas Richards, glancing at a Premier Election Solutions machine currently in use in Georgia. The DEF CON cybersecurity conference is held annually in Las Vegas. This year, for the first time, the conference is hosting a “Voting Machine Village” where attendees can try to hack a number of systems and help catch vulnerabilities. The conference acquired 30 machines for hackers to toy with. Every voting machine in the village was hacked.

National: It took DEF CON hackers minutes to pwn these US voting machines | The Register

After the debacle of the 2000 presidential election count, the US invested heavily in electronic voting systems – but not, it seems, the security to protect them. This year at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, 30 computer-powered ballot boxes used in American elections were set up in a simulated national White House race – and hackers got to work physically breaking the gear open to find out what was hidden inside. In less than 90 minutes, the first cracks in the systems’ defenses started appearing, revealing an embarrassing low level of security. Then one was hacked wirelessly. “Without question, our voting systems are weak and susceptible. Thanks to the contributions of the hacker community today, we’ve uncovered even more about exactly how,” said Jake Braun, who sold DEF CON founder Jeff Moss on the idea earlier this year. “The scary thing is we also know that our foreign adversaries – including Russia, North Korea, Iran – possess the capabilities to hack them too, in the process undermining principles of democracy and threatening our national security.”

National: 15 States Use Easily Hackable Voting Machines | HuffPost

In 2006, Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten received an anonymous message offering him a Diebold AccuVote TS, one of the most widely used touch-screen voting machines at the time. Manufacturers like Diebold touted the touch-screens, known as direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines, as secure and more convenient than their paper-based predecessors. Computer experts were skeptical, since any computer can be vulnerable to viruses and malware, but it was hard to get ahold of a touch-screen voting machine to test it. The manufacturers were so secretive about how the technology worked that they often required election officials to sign non-disclosure agreements preventing them from bringing in outside experts who could assess the machines. Felten was intrigued enough that he sent his 25-year-old computer science graduate student, Alex Halderman, on a mission to retrieve the AccuVote TS from a trenchcoat-clad man in an alleyway near New York’s Times Square. Felten’s team then spent the summer working in secrecy in an unmarked room in the basement of a building to reverse-engineer the machine. In September 2006, they published a research paper and an accompanying video detailing how they could spread malicious code to the AccuVote TS to change the record of the votes to produce whatever outcome the code writers desired. And the code could spread from one machine to another like a virus.

Georgia: Secretary of State plans security changes | Associated Press

Georgia’s top elections official stood out by refusing help from the Department of Homeland Security last August amid national concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp called it an attempted federal takeover and insisted his office was already protecting Georgia’s vote from hackers. That stance earned him national media coverage ahead of his campaign for governor. But Kemp’s assurances threatened to become a liability after new details emerged last month about major security mistakes at the center managing Georgia’s election technology. It turns out that the contractor left critical data wide open for months on the internet, and that for the second time under Kemp’s tenure, the personal information of every Georgia voter was exposed. With his critics demanding accountability, Kemp announced Friday that he plans to bring the center’s operations in-house within a year. His brief statement made no mention of the security flaws, saying “the ever-changing landscape of technology demands that we change with it.”

Voting Blogs: Why Do Georgia Election Officials Insist on 100% Unverifiable Elections? | BradBlog

“I worry that what we have here in Georgia is the Titanic Effect,” Georgia Tech Computer Scientist Richard DeMillo observed, regarding the myriad security issues revealed during the course of last month’s U.S. House Special Election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. “Georgia officials are convinced the state’s election system cannot be breached. Shades of the ‘unsinkable ship’. They have neglected to give us life boats…a fail-safe system designed so that in case of a catastrophe Georgia voters can easily verify that reported vote totals match voter intent. It is the sort of common-sense approach that first-year engineering students learn. Other states have that capability. Inexplicably, Georgia does not,” DeMillo said in a statement quoted in support of a legal challenge filed contesting the 100% unverifiable results of the June 20 contest. The computer scientist’s concerns are hardly the first expressed about Georgia’s absurd voting system. In fact, they cap well over a decade of chilling revelations, shocking vulnerabilities and dire warnings issued from the community of experts who have examined the Peach State’s voting system, including a number of those who installed it in the first place back in 2002.

Georgia: State to shift elections work in-house, away from Kennesaw State | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Georgia, for the first time in more than a decade, 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 Georgia Secretary of State’s Office and university officials both confirmed to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the two entities have signed a final contract good through June 2018. For the first time, however, it includes a provision for either party to terminate it midstream. That’s because the office over the next year will build its own team to run Georgia’s elections — work the KSU center has done for the past 15 years. ”Today my office and Kennesaw State University executed what will be the final contract between our two entities related to the Center for Election Systems,” Secretary of State Brian Kemp said in a statement to the AJC. “The ever-changing landscape of technology demands that we change with it.

Georgia: Buying voting machines in Georgia not so simple anymore | The Brunswick News

Voting being the essential democratic function that it is, the Glynn County Board of Elections is charged with keeping the county’s voting machines running and in good condition. That task has become more difficult this year. The board voted Tuesday to buy five used voting machines from San Diego County, Calif., to use as backups. The machines board members chose to buy have only been used once and can be had at a savings. However, they did not have the option to buy new machines. No county in Georgia does. Glynn County Board of Elections Supervisor Tina Edwards said the board was prompted to buy the machines because the newer models are no longer being sold by the manufacturer, Electronic Systems and Software. San Diego County is the only source of the machines that she is aware of at the moment. The company has no plans to stock more in the near future, leaving Georgia counties with no choice but to buy machines secondhand or from third parties, Edwards said.

Georgia: State Voting System Update Gaining Bipartisan Support | WABE

The call to overhaul Georgia’s 15-year-old voting system is getting bipartisan support. State lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed on social media to work together on an update. The problem isn’t a new one. Georgia’s voting machines leave no paper trail — that means there’s no way to confirm that what someone voted for is what gets recorded. Democratic state Rep. Scott Holcomb, who represents District 81, said what’s different about this moment is the national conversation about cybersecurity. “Part of Russian foreign policy — this is really simple, it’s not complicated — they purposely involve themselves in manipulating the elections in Western democracies,” Holcomb said. He said ensuring the public’s belief in the accuracy of Georgia’s voting system is especially important in a time when hacking headlines are a daily occurrence.

Georgia: Lawsuit filed to throw out 6th District result | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Karen Handel’s win in the hotly contested 6th Congressional District special election should be thrown out and the contest redone, according to a new lawsuit seeking to ultimately invalidate Georgia’s aging electronic voting system. The suit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court, is the second pursued in less than two months by a Colorado-based group over the security of Georgia’s election infrastructure. The suit says those concerns include private cybersecurity researcher Logan Lamb’s finding last year that a misconfigured server at Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems — which has helped run Georgia’s elections for the past 15 years — exposed more than 6.5 million voter records and other sensitive information that opponents said could be used to alter results. The same records were accessed a second time earlier this year by another security researcher. The FBI investigated both Lamb’s and the second researcher’s probing but did not file charges, saying neither of the two had broken federal law.

Georgia: Secretary of State’s office: “We look forward to our day in court” | WGCL

A spokeswoman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp indicated Thursday that Kemp is eager to show a jury why there should not be a rematch between Karen Handel and Jon Ossoff in the 6th District Congressional race. The plaintiffs, meanwhile, demonstrated for reporters why they believe their lawsuit has merit. A diverse group of Georgia voters, along with a nonprofit government watchdog group, filed a lawsuit Monday in Fulton County Superior Court demanding that the results of the June 20th special election runoff be tossed out. The suit requests a new election using a paper ballot system. The suit names as defendants Kemp, local elections supervisors who oversaw the runoff election, and Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems and its director, Merle King.