United Kingdom: Former MI6 chief warns over hacking risk to electronic voting in UK elections | Telegraph

A former head of MI6 has warned against switching elections to electronic voting because of the risk of hacking and cyber attacks. Sir John Sawers said the traditional method of pencil and paper voting in polling booths was more secure than electronic alternatives. The retired spy chief spoke after his successor recently warned that cyber attacks and attempts to subvert democracy by states like Russia pose a fundamental threat to British sovereignty. Fears of high tech meddling in polls have been heightened by American accusations that Kremlin-backed cyber gangs hacked US political organisations and leaked sensitive emails to deliberately undermine the presidential elections. All parliamentary and council elections in the UK are currently carried out with ballot papers, but a commission set up by the speaker, John Bercow, in 2015 called for secure online voting to be available by 2020.

National: Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking | The New York Times

President Obama struck back at Russia on Thursday for its efforts to influence the 2016 election, ejecting 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposing sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services. The administration also penalized four top officers of one of those services, the powerful military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the G.R.U. ordered the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations, with the approval of the Kremlin, and ultimately enabled the publication of the emails it harvested. The expulsion of the 35 Russians, whom the administration said were spies posing as diplomats and other officials, and their families was in response to the harassment of American diplomats in Russia, State Department officials said. It was unclear if they were involved in the hacking.

National: Recounts or no, US elections are still vulnerable to hacking | Associated Press

Jill Stein’s bid to recount votes in Pennsylvania was in trouble even before a federal judge shot it down Dec. 12. That’s because the Green Party candidate’s effort stood little chance of detecting potential fraud or error in the vote — there was basically nothing to recount. Pennsylvania is one of 11 states where the majority of voters use antiquated machines that store votes electronically, without printed ballots or other paper-based backups that could be used to double-check the balloting. There’s almost no way to know if they’ve accurately recorded individual votes — or if anyone tampered with the count. More than 80 percent of Pennsylvanians who voted Nov. 8 cast their ballots on such machines, according to VotePA, a nonprofit seeking their replacement. VotePA’s Marybeth Kuznik described the proposed recount this way: “You go to the computer and you say, ‘OK, computer, you counted this a week-and-a-half ago. Were you right the first time?'” These paperless digital voting machines, used by roughly 1 in 5 U.S. voters last month, present one of the most glaring dangers to the security of the rickety, underfunded U.S. election system. Like many electronic voting machines, they are vulnerable to hacking. But other machines typically leave a paper trail that could be manually checked. The paperless digital machines open the door to potential election rigging that might not ever be detected.

National: State election recounts confirm Trump win but reveal hacking vulnerabilities | The Guardian

The US presidential election was correct, according to a crowdfunded effort to recount the vote in key states, but the review also highlighted the unprecedented extent to which the American political system is vulnerable to cyberattack, according to two computer scientists who helped the effort to audit the vote. J Alex Halderman and Matt Bernhard, both of the University of Michigan, campaigned in favor of a recount of the US presidential election, which was eventually spearheaded by Jill Stein, the Green party candidate. Only the Wisconsin recount was substantially completed, with the recount in Michigan eventually stopped and a potential recount in Pennsylvania killed before it had even begun. But the researchers say the recounted counties and precincts were enough to give them confidence that Donald Trump is the genuine winner of the election. “The recounts support that the election outcome was correct,” Bernhard told the Chaos Communications Congress cybersecurity convention in Hamburg, where he and Halderman gave a talk summarising their findings.

Editorials: The Electoral College Doesn’t Work the Way the Founding Fathers Intended | Robert Schlesinger/US News & World Report

Regardless of whether you want to preserve the Electoral College as it is, tweak it (as I do) or scrap it entirely, you have to understand that it doesn’t function today the way the Founding Fathers planned. I think this is worth pointing out in light of the animated responses I’ve gotten from readers regarding my last column, which called for reform by adding a set of bonus electoral votes which would be rewarded to the winner of the national popular vote. People seem to make a couple of errors in their reverence for the Electoral College. First, they misunderstand its purpose, and concomitantly they misunderstand what it does and doesn’t constitutionally entail.

Alabama: Department of Transportation: Alabama to expand driver’s license office hours after probe | AL.com

U.S. Department of Transportation officials said Wednesday that Alabama has agreed to expand driver’s license office hours after determining that black residents in the state were disproportionately hurt by a slate of closures and reductions in 2015. The federal agency launched an investigation last year after Alabama, citing budget concerns, shuttered 31 part-time offices where examiners gave driving tests about once per week. The state said the closures were aimed at the offices that issued the fewest licenses each year, but the closures also came down hard on rural and heavily minority communities. It left more than a third of Alabama’s 67 counties without a license office, including eight of the state’s 11 counties with a majority African-American population.

Michigan: Stein: Election audits should be automatic in Michigan | The Detroit News

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said Wednesday her abbreviated recount effort showed the vote “was not carefully guarded” in Michigan and should spur legislative action to require automatic post-election audits. Republican President-elect Donald Trump was poised to maintain his 10,000-vote margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton when Michigan’s hand recount was halted more than two million ballots in, but Stein suggested the rare glimpse under the hood of the state election system served an important purpose. “What we discovered is we do not have a system that we can trust,” Stein said in a radio interview on Michigan’s Big Show, citing complaints from Detroit election officials who said 87 optical scanner voting machines failed on Election Day, along with other documented vote count and ballot handling irregularities.

North Carolina: Judge puts GOP elections board makeover on hold after Roy Cooper sues | News & Observer

Governor-elect Roy Cooper filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the General Assembly’s special session law that revamps the state elections board. The lawsuit was the second filed in the waning days of Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration that challenge changes that were adopted by the General Assembly in a special session in December and signed into law by the Republican governor. On Thursday, the state Board of Education sued legislators over a law that would transfer their power to set education policy to the new state superintendent, a Republican. An attorney representing Cooper said at a court hearing Friday that more challenges could be filed next week by the new Democratic governor contesting other changes to his appointment powers – setting the stage for a contentious beginning between the state’s chief executive officer and the Republican lawmakers at the helm of both General Assembly chambers. Cooper is scheduled to be sworn in as governor as soon after midnight on Jan. 1 as possible, though his public inauguration is not taking place until Jan. 7.

Texas: Plaintiffs in redistricting case ask federal district court to rule | Dallas Morning News

Plaintiffs in an ongoing court battle over Texas’ 2011 district maps have filed a joint motion calling for the federal judges considering the case to issue a ruling by next month. The plaintiffs — including the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, the Texas Latino Redistricting Task Force and the League of United Latin American Citizens — sued the state in 2011, claiming the maps adopted for state House, Senate and Texas congressional districts were unconstitutional and harm minority voters.

The Gambia: President Orders Electoral Commission Reopened | AFP

The Gambia’s electoral commission building reopened on Thursday as the president said it had been shut for safety reasons rather than because of the country’s disputed presidential vote result. President Yahya Jammeh’s political party has lodged a legal complaint against the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) triggered in part by a vote recount in the days following a December 1 election, which ultimately confirmed opponent Adama Barrow’s victory, 22 years after Jammeh took power. The commission buiding was sealed off without warning by security forces on December 13, the same day the complaint to have the result annulled was lodged.

United Kingdom: British plan to force voters to show ID provokes a backlash | The Washington Post

The British government said Tuesday that it would begin rolling out mandatory identity checks for voters, prompting a backlash from those who say the move could effectively disenfranchise millions. The controversy, with strong echoes of one that played out across the United States this year, turns on the question of whether identity checks are a reasonable tool to combat electoral fraud or are merely an attempt at voter suppression by another name. Until now, voters in every part of Britain except Northern Ireland have been allowed to vote without presenting an ID. But that will change under a pilot program announced Tuesday by Britain’s Conservative government. A photo ID, such as a driver’s license or passport, will be required in up to 18 different areas across England for local elections in 2018. If the program is successful, it could be expanded nationwide. Britain is next expected to hold national elections in 2020.

National: FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House | The Washington Post

FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House, officials disclosed Friday, as President Obama issued a public warning to Moscow that it could face retaliation. New revelations about Comey’s position could put to rest suggestions by some lawmakers that the CIA and the FBI weren’t on the same page on Russian President Vladi­mir Putin’s intentions. Russia has denied being behind the cyber-intrusions, which targeted the Democratic National Committee and the private emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Trump, in turn, has repeatedly said he doubts the veracity of U.S. intelligence blaming Moscow for the hacks. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” his first Sunday news-show appearance since the Nov. 8 election. “I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it. . . . No, I don’t believe it at all.” At a “thank you” event Thursday night with some of her top campaign donors and fundraisers, Clinton said she believed Russian-backed hackers went after her campaign because of a personal grudge that Putin had against her. Putin had blamed Clinton for fomenting mass protests in Russia after disputed 2011 parliamentary elections that challenged his rule. Putin said Clinton, then secretary of state, had “sent a signal” to protesters by labeling the elections “neither free nor fair.”

National: U.S. Election Assistance Commission breached by hackers after November vote | Reuters

The U.S. agency charged with ensuring that voting machines meet security standards was itself penetrated by a hacker after the November elections, according to a security firm working with law enforcement on the matter. The security firm, Recorded Future, was monitoring underground electronic markets where hackers buy and sell wares and discovered someone offering log-on credentials for access to computers at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, company executives said. Posing as a potential buyer, the researchers engaged in a conversation with the hacker, said Levi Gundert, vice president of intelligence at the company, and Andrei Barysevich, director of advanced collection. Eventually they discovered that the Russian-speaking hacker had obtained the credentials of more than 100 people at the election commission after exploiting a common database vulnerability, the researchers said.

National: 40 Electoral College members demand briefing on Russian interference | The Hill

Forty members of the Electoral College on Tuesday signed a letter demanding an intelligence briefing on Russian interference in the election ahead of their Dec. 19 vote. Ten electors originally signed the letter when it was published Monday, and 30 more have since added their names. The open letter — led by Christine Pelosi, the daughter of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) — urged Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to give a detailed briefing on President-elect Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. “We further require a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States,” the letter read.

National: Stymied vote recount exposed flaws in ballot integrity, Jill Stein says | Los Angeles Times

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, conceded Tuesday that her three-state vote recount drive was “stopped in its tracks,” but said she’d illuminated the need to shore up the security of balloting nationwide. “While the count may have stopped, the movement for a voting system we can trust has been enormously energized,” Stein told reporters on a conference call. Stein raised more than $7 million to seek recounts of the presidential vote in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump narrowly won those states. Courts have blocked recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Wisconsin recount that was completed Monday wound up widening Trump’s margin of victory there to 22,748 votes out of the 2,976,150 cast.

Editorials: Michigan recount reveals voting outrages | The Detroit News

With the move to recount Michigan’s presidential ballots still tangled up in the courts, we may never know for sure whether it might have changed the outcome of the election. But we did learn some outrageous things about the state’s electoral process. The key revelation is that the system in many places is rife with incompetence that results in the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters who cast ballots that don’t get counted. In Wayne County, for example, one-third of the ballots cast on Nov. 8 would not have been eligible for recount because of handling irregularities; in the city of Detroit, it was half the votes. Had the recount been allowed to proceed, it would have been useless without those ruined Detroit and Wayne County ballots, and others from Genesee County and elsewhere.

North Carolina: Senate passes controversial merger of ethics, elections boards | WRAL

The state Senate has signed off on legislation that creates a single board to oversee the state’s ethics, lobbying and elections administration. Republican sponsors insist it is aimed at creating a bipartisan panel to oversee all decisions on lobbying, elections and ethics rules. But that eight-member board would need six votes to take any action, something critics say would bog it down and make it less able to act. Senate readies elections, ethics overhaul “That will require bipartisan cooperation,” said Sen. Tommy Tucker, R-Union. The idea, he said, would be to encourage consensus decisions. The measure passed 30-16 and is now headed to the House for consideration. Deliberations were interrupted by protestors who at various times laughed, clapped or expressed disapproval. After a third interruption, Lt. Gov. Dan Forest ordered the visitor’s gallery cleared. That provoked an even louder outburst followed by chanting once the doors were finally locked.

Ohio: Hackers hit Henry County voter database | The Courier

Attempts by computer hackers to hold Henry County’s voter database for ransom had county and state officials scrambling just days before the Nov. 8 general election. Voters were advised about the data breach in a letter sent by the Henry County commissioners earlier this month. Commissioner Glenn Miller said the voter database was restored from backups at the county and state level, and no ransom was paid. He said officials have no reason to believe the security breach compromised election results, or that voter registration information was extracted from the system. The ransomware attack occurred on Oct. 31. Ransomware is a malicious software used to deny access to the owner’s data in an effort to extort money. Miller said hackers that use ransomware are typically after money, not stealing data.

Pennsylvania: Judge rejects Green Party’s Pennsylvania recount case | Associated Press

A federal judge on Monday issued a stinging rejection of a Green Party-backed request to recount paper ballots in Pennsylvania’s presidential election, won narrowly by Republican Donald Trump, and scan some counties’ election systems for signs of hacking. In his 31-page decision, U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond said there were at least six grounds that required him to reject the Green Party’s lawsuit, which had been opposed by Trump, the Pennsylvania Republican Party and the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office. The Green Party has been successful in at least getting statewide recounts started in Wisconsin and Michigan, but it has failed to get a statewide recount begun or ordered in Pennsylvania. Suspicion of a hacked Pennsylvania election “borders on the irrational” while granting the Green Party’s recount bid could “ensure that that no Pennsylvania vote counts” given Tuesday’s federal deadline to certify the vote for the Electoral College, wrote Diamond, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, a Republican.

Editorials: The ticking time bomb in Pennsylvania’s election system | Dan Lopresti/Philadelphia Inquirer

Our state’s voting machines are inherently flawed, and they cannot be trusted to accurately record or reflect the votes cast by the people of Pennsylvania. Whether it happens this month or not, the electronic voting systems in our state must undergo a full forensic evaluation by independent computer security experts. Without that evaluation and subsequent changes both in the machines and the procedures for using them, votes cast for our local, state and federal government will always be at risk for error or manipulation, and we can never be fully certain that the outcomes of our elections reflect the will of the voters. A number of years ago, I acquired two different electronic voting machines (known as DREs) from government surplus sales – the type used in Philadelphia County and the type used in Montgomery County – and, with Lehigh students, dismantled and examined them. In my assessment, none of the DREs used in Pennsylvania are capable of retaining a permanent physical record of each vote cast, which is required by the Pennsylvania Election Code. Many of the voting machines used in Pennsylvania, including those used in Philadelphia, create no permanent, physical record of each vote cast – in other words, these machines leave no paper trail. As anyone with a computer knows, data stored electronically is easily lost or corrupted. It would be comforting to think that voting machines are more sophisticated or secure than home or office computers, but in many ways, they are not. They are computers running software like all other computers running software, and they are vulnerable to the same kinds of problems as all of our other computers. Computer memory, including the memory that stores the votes in the voting machines used throughout the last election across Pennsylvania, can be written or rewritten with incorrect data as a result of software, hardware and human error, or as a result of intentional interference.

Virginia: Voter ID law upheld by federal court after Democratic challenge | The Guardian

A federal appeals court has upheld a Virginia law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, rejecting a challenge from Democrats who argued that it suppressed voting by minorities and young people. A three-judge panel of the fourth US circuit court of appeals ruled on Tuesday that the law did not violate the Voting Rights Act or impose an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. The ruling comes just months after a different panel of the same court struck down a North Carolina law that required voters to produce a photo ID and also scrapped same-day registration and shortened early voting periods. But the panel that issued Tuesday’s ruling found that the facts in the North Carolina case “are in no way” like those in the passage of Virginia’s bill. Virginians can obtain free photo IDs at voter registrar offices, but Democrats argued that few people knew about that option because the state had done little to spread the word.

Europe: Governments brace for Russian hacking in upcoming elections | Politico

European governments are bracing for cyber-meddling by Moscow in upcoming national elections in France, the Netherlands and Germany. Amid uproar in the United States over CIA findings that Russian hackers interceded in the election to help President-elect Donald Trump, a series of incidents in Europe have led to stark warnings by high-level officials, particularly in Germany, and by cybersecurity experts who say online political and information warfare is certain to worsen. In a remarkable two-page warning late last week, Hans-Georg Maaßen, the head of Germany’s Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution, a domestic security agency, said there was a clear threat from Russian hackers seeking to sow “uncertainty in German society” and to destabilize the country. “In the political arena we see increasing and aggressive cyber-espionage,” Maaßen said. “We see a potential hazard to members of the German government, the Bundestag and employees of democratic parties through cyber-operations.” On Monday, German MEPs across the political spectrum echoed those worries.

The Gambia: Military takes over offices of electoral commission | The Guardian

Yahya Jammeh, the autocratic ruler of the Gambia, has moved to resist his presidential election defeat, sending armed soldiers to take control of the electoral commission headquarters and filing a petition to the supreme court as a delegation of African leaders urged him to stand down. The petition said the electoral commission had “failed to properly collate the results” of the election, which Jammeh lost to challenger Adama Barrow. It came after the president of the electoral commission was thrown out of his office shortly before the leaders’ delegation arrived in the country.

National: A ‘Political Horror Show’ of Recounts, 16 Years After Hanging Chads | The New York Times

The recount of the presidential election ended on Wednesday night as abruptly as it had begun. By Thursday, workers were packing away canvas bags of ballots, board records and tables and chairs. A legal battle halted proceedings before all of Michigan’s votes were counted again, but not before a flood of perplexing peculiarities emerged. An effort to recount the votes here and in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin led by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, was never viewed as very likely to change Donald J. Trump’s election to the presidency, but it revealed something else in stark terms: 16 years after a different presidential recount in Florida dragged on for five agonizing weeks, bringing the nation close to a constitutional crisis, recounts remain a tangle of dueling lawyers, hyperpartisanship and claims of flawed technology. States still have vastly different systems for calling recounts and for carrying them out. Counting standards are inconsistent from state to state, and obscure provisions, like one in Michigan that deems some precincts not “recountable,” threaten to raise more public doubt about elections than confidence. Some of the most basic questions — is it better to count by hand, or with a machine? — have not been settled.

National: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House | The Washington Post

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances. “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

Editorials: Recount: what democracy looks like | Detroit Free Press

What does democracy look like? On Wednesday, a rubber thumb. As a controversial recount of Michigan’s presidential election entered its third day, the rubber thumb — kind of like the finger part of a rubber glove, but with nubs — was in high demand at Detroit’s Cobo Center. Recount workers lucky enough to claim one of those humble accessories could page quickly through stacks of ballots, hastening the painstaking rounds of counting and sorting needed to recount an election. First challenge: Determine whether any given bundle of ballots is recountable. That means counting some ballot boxes, each containing hundreds of the paper slips, two and three times before even beginning to determine for whom each ballot was cast, all under the patient eyes of volunteer observers from three presidential campaigns. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein lost by an insurmountable 2 million votes, but asked for the recount because, she says, she’s concerned about the integrity of Michigan elections. She’s not the only one — University of Michigan computer scientist Alex Halderman has identified vulnerabilities in the system that it’s not currently designed to ward off, and President-elect Donald Trump himself has claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast in the election he won. A federal judge halted Michigan’s presidential recount late Wednesday night, but an appeal is expected.

Florida: Voters challenge for recount: A call to address election issues? | CS Monitor

With their call for a recount in Florida, a group of voters may hope to encourage a push for change in voting procedure – even if the recount itself is a long shot. Citing concerns about hacking, malfunctioning voting machines, and voters being turned away, three central Florida voters have brought a lawsuit against President-elect Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, and the Sunshine State’s 29 Republican electors. They are calling for a hand recount of all paper ballots, to be paid for by the defendants. The group’s lawyer, Clint Curtis, acknowledged that Mr. Trump, Governor Scott, and others can ignore the recount request entirely. But the suit, the latest of several to question the 2016 election results, may strengthen calls to address election issues.

Michigan: Michigan Supreme Court denies Jill Stein’s appeal in recount case | MLive

The Michigan Supreme Court has denied Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s appeal to restart the statewide presidential recount, exhausting what’s likely the last legal option for the Stein campaign. In a 3-2 order issued Friday evening, the court ruled a recount petition in Michigan “must allege both that fraud or mistake exists and that the alleged fraud or mistake caused the candidate to be aggrieved.” The majority order concurs with a State Court of Appeals ruling that ordered Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, which certifies election results and handles other election-related issues, to reject the recount on grounds that Stein was not sufficiently “aggrieved” as required under state statute earlier this week. The Michigan Supreme Court justices split along partisan lines, with all three Republican-nominated judges ordering a denial of Stein’s appeal. The two Democratic-nominated judges, Richard Bernstein and Bridget McCormack, each wrote dissenting opinions.

Nevada: Partial recount of Nevadans’ presidential ballots confirms Nov. 8 results | Las Vegas Review-Journal

A limited recount of presidential ballots cast in Nevada confirmed the results of the Nov. 8 election and eliminated the possibility of a statewide recount, the secretary of state’s office said Thursday. The partial recount in 92 precincts, requested and paid for by independent candidate Roque “Rocky De La Fuente, “yielded no change in the number of votes cast for him,” said Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske. De La Fuente, who came in dead last in the presidential race in Nevada, said he requested the recount because he was concerned about the integrity of the vote. The recounts did result in nine fewer votes for Democrat Hillary Clinton and six fewer for Republican Donald Trump, but no other changes were identified, the Secretary of State’s Office said in a news release. De La Fuente received 2,552 votes, or 0.23 percent, in the election. Clinton won the state with 47.9 percent, beating Republican President-elect Donald Trump by nearly 2.5 percent.

Pennsylvania: Decision coming Monday on Stein’s request for statewide recount | Philadelphia Inquirer

A Philadelphia judge said he will rule Monday on the Green Party-backed petition for a statewide Pennsylvania recount, but signaled that the clock may be running out because the state must certify its election results for the Electoral College vote. U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond announced his plans after a Friday afternoon hearing at which supporters of Green Party nominee Jill Stein continued their bid for the review, citing potential security vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines statewide. Diamond, however, seemed most concerned with the limited time Stein’s lawyers had left him to act, by waiting nearly a month after the election to file their lawsuit. Any court-ordered delay in meeting the Tuesday certification deadline could put Pennsylvania’s electoral votes in jeopardy when the Electoral College convenes Dec. 19.