Editorials: Ireland was ahead of the curve on hacking | Kathy Sheridan/The Irish Times

Opinion writers stand accused of undue negativity, so make way for a few heart-lifting positives. Well-thumbed physical election registers. Paper ballots. Stubby pencils. Interminable counts surveyed by gimlet-eyed tallymen and women. That’s our fabulously antiquated voting system and it stands up well. Last week, by contrast, Americans learned that the electronic voting systems of 21 states were targeted by Russian hackers in 2016 and some had been “actually successfully penetrated”, in the words of the US head of cybersecurity. The targeting may have been exploratory probes for system vulnerabilities to be exploited later, say experts, pointing to the crumbling US digital voting apparatus. In other words, the 2016 hackers could look like plankton compared with the shark attacks expected around the forthcoming mid-term elections, with their potential to rebalance power in America.

Editorials: The best safeguard against election hacking | Brian Klaas/The Washington Post

This week, the U.S. government confirmed that Russian hackers infiltrated voting systems in several states, having targeted 21 of them. While there is currently no evidence suggesting any votes were changed, a hostile foreign power did gain access to voter registration databases — the vital foundation of election integrity. After all, if you control who can and cannot vote, you control a democracy. America’s foolish experiment with digital voting processes must end. The Kremlin — or other hostile foreign actors — will certainly strike again. It’s time for good old-fashioned paper to make a comeback. Researchers at Princeton University have shown that they can pick the lock on voting machines in seven seconds. In minutes, they could have replaced the machine’s chip with a malicious one, ensuring that voters who voted for candidate A were recorded as having voted for candidate B. Thankfully, their demonstrations were just for research. But they could have been real.

Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania to require voting machines with paper backup | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf is ordering counties that plan to replace their electronic voting systems to buy machines that leave a paper trail. The Democrat’s administration says the move will increase the security of voting systems and make balloting easier to audit. Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states where most voters use antiquated machines that store votes electronically without printed ballots or other paper-based backups that could be used to double-check the vote.

Editorials: No conspiracy in paper voting | The Covington News

As could be expected in an election year, a proposal to overhaul the state’s method of voting is getting bogged down in politics. But it shouldn’t, because this is too important. For background: Georgia uses 16-year-old touchscreen technology for its elections. The machines are powered by Windows 2000, which Microsoft doesn’t even support anymore. And there are always questions about the lack of a paper trail. Votes are recorded on data packs, which can be run through a machine again, but without seeing a voter’s actual ballot, there’s going to be a question of whether tampering might have happened.

Georgia: Paper Ballot Push Gets Boost With Support Of Georgia Lt. Governor | WABE

The effort to retire Georgia’s aging, electronic voting machines got a boost Wednesday from Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, leader of the state Senate, who said the legislature must act “in haste” to setup a new paper ballot system. “I think it is important that we have a paper ballot trail that ensures that accuracy is there, and that there are no games that potentially could be played,” Cagle, a Republican candidate for governor, said in an interview with WABE. Georgia is one of just a few states that exclusively use voting machines without a paper trail. Cybersecurity experts agree it exposes the system to potential doubt, hacks and glitches. “I’m super excited to have Lt. Gov. Cagle on board,” said Republican Rep. Scot Turner, the lead sponsor of a bi-partisan bill in the House that would require the state move to a paper ballot system, which could be audited.

Florida: Why did Broward destroy 2016 ballots? Sanders ally seeks US probe. | CSMonitor.com

A South Florida law professor, running to unseat Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is calling for a federal investigation into the destruction of all ballots cast in the August 2016 Democratic primary in Broward County. The challenger, Tim Canova, has made repeated public records requests and filed a lawsuit seeking access to paper ballots cast in his unsuccessful race last year against the former Democratic National Committee chair in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. A statistical analysis of the primary conducted last year suggested the election results were “potentially implausible.” Over the past year, the Broward supervisor of elections, Brenda Snipes, has taken no action on Mr. Canova’s requests to examine the ballots, and she has urged a judge to throw Canova’s lawsuit out. Despite the pending records requests and the ongoing litigation, Dr. Snipes ordered the ballots and other election documents destroyed, according to papers filed in circuit court here.

Ohio: Elections chief wants new voting machines by 2020 | Associated Press

Ohio’s elections chief wants counties to modernize their voting machines before the 2020 presidential election, and he’s urging the governor and state lawmakers to foot much of the bill. Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted sent a letter to Gov. John Kasich, his budget director and state legislative leaders on Thursday seeking $118 million in state capital funds for the project. “While I am confident that the storage, maintenance and operating procedures used by the boards of elections will ensure that these systems remain secure and accurate through the 2018 election cycle, Ohio’s leaders must act soon to ensure an orderly transition to newer equipment well before the 2020 presidential general election,” he wrote. Ohio is a bellwether political state with about 7.9 million registered voters. Donald Trump, a Republican, won the state’s 2016 presidential contest against Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, by 447,000 votes, more than 8 percentage points.

Louisiana: Secretary of State asking how much will it cost to change the way Louisiana votes | The Advocate

Louisiana is looking for new voting machines and a new way to vote. The Secretary of State’s office is seeking proposals to replace voting machines across the state and for software that will create a paper ballot on those machines that the voter can review before casting the vote. “It takes away the perception that the machine switched the votes,” Secretary of State Tom Schedler said Tuesday. It’s highly unlikely that vote switching could happen. But recent incidents, such as news that someone hacked into voter registration lists or that Russia may have interfered with elections, have led many to worry about possible computerized tampering at the ballot box. The system Schedler seeks would create a paper trail that would allow officials to go back and physically count the ballots cast.

Georgia: Paper ballots pass Election Day test in Georgia | Atlanta Journal Constitution

The results are in from this month’s test run of a voting system that could bring paper ballots back to Georgia: It was easy to use and fast, but it would come with a high cost to taxpayers. The trial of the touch screen-plus-paper ballot voting system “came off without a hitch” when it was tried during the Nov. 7 election for Conyers’ mayor and City Council, Georgia Elections Director Chris Harvey said. Though this voting system would be an improvement over Georgia’s 15-year-old paperless machines, an election transparency group called Verified Voting says the state should stop using touch screens and return to the simple efficiency of filling out ballots with pens or pencils, like about 70 percent of the nation. During the trial run, voters picked their candidates on touch-screen machines, which then printed out a filled-in paper ballot that reflected their choices. Then voters could review their paper ballots for accuracy before feeding them into a trash can-shaped machine, which scanned the ballots, counted them and deposited them into a locked container.

Virginia: Recounts expected following tight races in the Virginia House | WVEC

Three Virginia House of Delegates races are too close to call. Just 12 votes separate Republican incumbent David Yancey from democrat Shelly Simonds in the 94th District.  It could mean a handful of recounts across the state will decide who controls the General Assembly for the next two years. Elections officials say the final vote count has not been finalized because elections offices in cities and counties still have a few days to count ballots. Elections offices must have a count by Wednesday to the State Board of Elections. The Board has until Nov. 20 to present a certified final tally.

New Jersey: Pols Push for Voting Machines that Offer Paper Trail for Every Ballot Cast | NJ Spotlight

Voters across New Jersey are going to polling places today to pick a new governor, select candidates for seats in the state Legislature, and to decide many contested county and municipal elections. But questions have been raised in recent weeks about whether the electronic machines that will be used to count the vote in many places in New Jersey are vulnerable to computer error or even hacking, and lawmakers are pushing for the machines to eventually be upgraded so there’s a “voter-verified” paper trail to back up each vote that is cast on Election Day. To be sure, there’s been no evidence of any widespread voting-machine failure or large-scale tampering leading up to today’s elections in New Jersey, and election officials say there have been no recorded cases of an electronic-voting machine having been hacked in New Jersey during any recent election. What’s more, the machines themselves are not attached to any network so hacking would have to occur in person rather than remotely. But a Princeton University computer-science professor opened the eyes of lawmakers by showing them during a recent hearing in Trenton how voting machines that are used in 18 of New Jersey’s 21 counties could theoretically be hacked manually by someone seeking to make sure an election turns out in a specific way.

National: Rep. Debbie Dingell’s bill would require paper voting, recounts in close elections | The Hill

A new bill would require states to use voting machines with paper backups and conduct audits in close elections. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) introduced the Safeguarding Election Infrastructure Act on Wednesday, which aims to increase elections security by requiring voting machines funded by the federal Help America Vote Act print a paper receipt of each vote. “Our democracy depends on free and fair elections, and we must do everything we can to protect the security and integrity of that process,” said Dingell in a written statement. “The reality is, many of our voting machines have not been updated in nearly two decades and are susceptible to cyberattacks. We know that foreign adversaries pay very close attention to our elections, and until we address these vulnerabilities, our democratic process is at risk,” she said.

Virginia: Potential chaos ahead as control of Virginia House of Delegates hangs in balance | The Washington Post

Whether Virginia’s deep-red House of Delegates turns blue, or an awkward purple, comes down to a few dozen votes and potential handshake deals. Republicans, who held 66 of 100 seats in the lower house of the state legislature, saw their majority melt away Tuesday in a Democratic wave that felled at least 12 GOP incumbents and flipped three open seats to the Democrats — an unprecedented shift. With four races still too close to call, both parties are bracing for the messiest of all outcomes: a dead-even 50-50 split that requires power-sharing and a potentially ugly fight for the speakership. That would be triggered if Democrats pick up one of the four races that are close enough for a state-funded recount. Republicans have leads difficult to overcome in three of them, including Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax), who narrowly pulled ahead of his challenger after unofficial results were tallied. Del. David Yancey (R-Newport News) is just 12 votes ahead of Democratic challenger Shelly Simonds, with provisional ballots still being counted through Monday.

Virginia: Localities scramble to get paper ballot voting machines in time for Election Day | WTVR

With Election Day rapidly approaching, poll workers in roughly a dozen localities all over the Commonwealth, including bigger cities like Norfolk and small ones like Hopewell, frantically train on brand new voting machines. On September 8, the Virginia Board of Elections voted to immediately de-certify all paper-less voting machines in the state. Those were the machines that allowed voters to vote by touching the screen. “We’ve had concerns in Virginia about the paper-less equipment for a while, and we’ve been kind of on a path to replacing them state-wide,” Edgardo Cortes, the state Commissioner of Elections, said.

New Mexico: State credits paper ballots as hacker protection | Associated Press

New Mexico credits its reliance on paper ballots in part for making the state less vulnerable to hackers and vote thieves.
The state was not among the 21 states where Russian hackers were accused of targeting voting systems last year, New Mexico election officials said. As concerns circulate about cybersecurity and the election process, more states are considering turning back to paper ballots, The Santa Fe New Mexican reported Tuesday. All 33 New Mexico counties use paper ballots after the Legislature passed a law in 2006 requiring physical ballots for any election held under state law. The ballots are counted with electronic scanners, and a paper trail is created that’s stored for nearly two years after most elections. Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said this process makes it more difficult for the outcome of an election to be altered.

New Mexico: State ‘ahead of the game’ on paper ballots | Santa Fe New Mexican

Your bank might want you to give up those paper statements sent in the mail in favor of an app on your smartphone, and your doctor might keep your medical records on a computer instead of in a manila folder. But New Mexico wants to keep your vote on a paper ballot, and a growing number of states are following suit, ditching paperless elections because of concerns about cybersecurity. Russian hackers, according to election officials, targeted voting systems in 21 states last year, but New Mexico was not among them. Government officials credit New Mexico’s reliance on paper ballots at least in part with making it less vulnerable to hackers and vote thieves. The New Mexico Legislature approved a law in 2006 requiring paper ballots for any election held under state law. All 33 counties in the state now use paper ballots. They are counted with electronic scanners, which create a paper trail that must be stored for nearly two years after most elections.

South Dakota: Elections board endorses electronic voting system law change | Associated Press

The state Board of Elections has endorsed draft legislation that would block a type of electronic voting system from being used in South Dakota. Secretary of State Shantel Krebs said Monday that a direct recording electronic voting system hasn’t been used in the state. Krebs says South Dakota uses paper ballots. The board supported 2018 draft legislation that would remove references to the machines from state law. Krebs says officials want to take a “very proactive approach.”

New Jersey: New Jersey to replace thousands of aging voting machines | WHYY

Many of the 11,000 voting machines in New Jersey are so old, officials said, they will soon have to be replaced. Amid concerns about hacking, state lawmakers are examining how to make sure new machines will be more secure. While there’s no evidence of hacking, the machines are hackable, said Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker, D-Middlesex. And Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel said he could quickly break the security seals on a voting machine, replace the chip that records the results, and reseal it so the tampering would be undetectable. “I was able to get a bunch of them and figure out what their weaknesses are,” he said during a hearing before lawmakers Thursday. “So if you have three or four seals on there, it’ll take me 10 minutes to get them off.”

Georgia: State test drives paper ballots | Valdosta Daily Times

Georgia election officials are bringing back paper ballots – at least temporarily – in the city of Conyers local election, providing a glimpse of what may one day replace the state’s aging voting machines. The on-loan voting equipment went into action last week in Conyers, a small city just outside of Atlanta, as early voting started for the Nov. 7 election. With the system being used in the pilot program, called the ExpressVote Universal Voting System, voters are issued a paper ballot that they insert into a touch-screen voting machine, prints their choices onto the ballot. Voters can then review their selections on the paper ballot before inserting it into a tabulation machine, which scans the ballots and secures them in a locked box. If there’s a mistake, the voter is issued a new ballot.

Editorials: States Take On Election Hacking. Washington Ignores It. | The New York Times

As Washington ignores the danger, state election officials have finally begun facing up to the threat of Russian hackers and other troublemakers infiltrating the American voting process in the midterm and presidential elections. There have been months of apparent indifference in many state election offices, despite stern warnings from federal security experts that hackers will be back for more after their 2016 meddling. But now state election officials have begun trying to tighten the security of outdated, vulnerable balloting systems. These systems were last updated after the hanging-chad debacle of the 2000 election, before internet hackers were a powerful threat.

Georgia: Paper ballot voting machines unveiled in Rockdale, Georgia’s first pilot | OCG News

Rockdale Elections Director Cynthia Welch recently held a demonstration showing off the new “paper” ballot voting machines that will be used in the Nov. 7 Conyers municipal elections. Rockdale is the first county in Georgia to pilot the new machines, which will provide voters with a paper ballot they can examine before casting their ballot in a tabulator machine that counts the votes. “If they’re not satisfied with their vote, they can take it to a poll worker and request a new ballot and start all over. Once they are satisfied with their selections, they can cast the ballot in the tabulator,” Welch said.

Delaware: Election Commission to send bids for new voting equipment | Delaware First Media

Delaware will put out a request for bids on new voting machines by the end of month. Delaware’s current voting machines have been in use since 1996. The state has about 1,600 voting machines. Considered state of art when they were purchased more than twenty years ago, they’re now outdated. A 2015 report by the Brennan Center for Justice notes that the machine models Delaware uses are no longer being made and have outlived their expected lifespan. …  Manlove adds Delaware will probably have to wait until 2020 for the new voting machines because the purchasing process will take some time.

Texas: Election Systems & Software Comments On Hart InterCivic Suing Texas Secretary Of State | ES&S

Election Systems & Software (ES&S) comments on Hart InterCivic’s suit against the Texas Secretary of State over allegations that the Secretary is exceeding his power by allowing the use of voting systems that produce a voter-verifiable paper record. The recently filed Hart lawsuit is a simple publicity stunt meant to give credibility to a frivolous position unsupported by law in order to eliminate state-of-the-art election technology from the marketplace. Hart claims that paper-based voter verifiable voting systems are unacceptable under section 121.003(12) of the Texas Election Code. They further argue that by authorizing the use of these paper based voting systems, the Secretary of State, who is the Chief Elections Officer in the State of Texas, would be engaging in unauthorized, illegal, and unconstitutional conduct. The Hart lawsuit was initiated in response to a request made by a Texas State Representative to the Texas Attorney General that touch screen devices which produce a voter verifiable paper record be allowed to qualify under section 121.003(12) and be eligible for use in the Texas countywide polling place program.

Texas: Why one of the largest counties in Texas is going back to paper ballots | The Texas Tribune

Frank Phillips spent last Wednesday staring down 600 boxes of election materials — voted ballots, blank ballots, precinct records — sitting in a warehouse run by Denton County. After sitting in storage for the legally required periods — up to nearly two years in some cases — the roughly 24,000 pounds of paper were finally ready to be shredded. Yet despite the hassle — and the significant cost — Phillips, Denton County’s elections administrator, is looking forward to this fall, when he will implement the county’s newest voting plan: a complete return to the paper ballot. The unusual move sets Denton, the ninth-largest county in Texas and one of the fastest-growing, apart from the state’s other biggest counties, which all use some form of electronic voting, according to data collected by the Secretary of State’s office. Both Bexar and Harris Counties, for example, have had all electronic voting systems in place for 15 years.

Illinois: Election officials work to protect your vote from high tech threats | WLS-TV

On Chicago’s South Side is a sprawling secure warehouse where election officials are testing every single piece of Chicago’s voting equipment to make sure it’s working right. “We know our reputation, we know what happened 50-60 years ago and we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” said Jim Allen, Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. But as voting technology changes new threats emerge. “You’re always concerned that hackers could try to target any part of your system but you try to take enough steps to mitigate the risk,” Allen said. Chicago’s answer to high-tech threats of hackers attempting to manipulate votes is actually a very old technology: paper. Each of the city’s electronic voting machines has a paper record so that voters can check their ballots before they’re cast and so that there’s a hard copy that can be examined in the case of a problem.

Minnesota: Paper trail is a cornerstone of state’s election integrity | Star Tribune

As more and more of our world goes digital, what important system relies on paper records any more? Democracy, for one. The heart of Minnesota’s plan to safeguard the 2016 election from hackers and fraudsters is a sheet of paper that people mark with a pen. No matter what happens to voting tabulators or election databases, officials can count those piles of paper ballots. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?” said Secretary of State Steve Simon, who will be on the hot seat if anything goes haywire on Nov. 8. After serving a decade as a legislator, the DFLer was elected to the Secretary of State’s office in 2014. Simon took over from fellow DFLer Mark Ritchie, who presided over two statewide election recounts that featured long and contentious sessions of shuffling and perusing thousands of paper ballots. “We really do have a culture here when it comes to election law of really relying on paper, and thank God for it,” Simon said last week. “We did not in Minnesota get distracted by the shiny object 15 or so years ago and go to touch-screen only with no receipt printouts or paper trail.”

Michigan: Could we have a rigged election? Tracking the vote in Michigan | Detroit Free Press

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has raised the possibility of a “rigged” election in November, although it’s unclear how he meant the comment. The director of Homeland Security is talking about placing the country’s election infrastructure under the agency’s cybersecurity apparatus. The Internet is aflame with conspiracy theories. So how would somebody go about manipulating votes? The answer: With extraordinary difficulty. There are so many sets of eyes looking at the voting process, the machinery so locked up — literally locked up — that even the savviest hacker would have difficulty cracking the code. But the biggest barriers to election fraud may be a simple piece of paper, and humble precinct workers — who are paid barely above minimum wage, but are there out of a sense of old-fashioned patriotism and service and are hell bent on doing the job right.

Maryland: Hogan questions reliability of new voting system | Associated Press

Gov. Larry Hogan said Wednesday that he is concerned about Maryland’s new voting system “collapsing” next year due to problems found during testing, but the state’s elections administrator said she was confident in the system, which will have paper ballots as a backup. The voting system came up unexpectedly at a Board of Public Works meeting, when Treasurer Nancy Kopp, a Democrat and one of three board members, asked how the state will manage voter education and outreach after a nearly $1 million contract was rejected by the board several months ago. Hogan, also a board member, said he was more concerned about the condition of the overall voting system, rather than what he described as a public relations campaign. … Linda Lamone, the state elections administrator, said some problems were found during testing, and elections officials are working to correct them. Lamone said officials haven’t verified exactly why there was a problem registering about 3,000 votes in Howard County. She said it appears a memory stick that was taken out of a voting unit and put into another device wasn’t recognized when returned to the system, because it apparently sensed there had been tampering.

Virginia: State Moves Back to Paper Ballots for the Election | Newsplex

Charlottesville resident Paul Jacob has been rocking the vote since he was 18. He’s been voting for nearly 60 years now and he’s seen quite a few changes. “From marking X’s, to punching holes,” said Jacob. “To the computers.” At Tuesday’s election, he’ll see one more. The city registrars office is taking people back to the future when it comes to voting. Touch screens are now a thing of the past and paper is back in style. One reason for the change is because of problems with voting machines in previous years. Another reason is computer hacking. Hacks have occurred across the United States, including Washington, D.C. To prevent that, Rick Sincere from the Electoral Board says the Commonwealth is steering away from computer voting statewide.