Tag Archives: tvnw

Russian hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the United States presidential election, the nation’s most senior intelligence and law enforcement officials have assured Congress and the White House in recent weeks. But disrupting it, they acknowledge, would be far easier — causing doubts in battleground states, prompting challenges to results and creating enough chaos to make Florida’s hanging chads seem like a quaint problem from the analog age. By some measures, in fact, the disruption has already begun. And meddling around the edges of an election could sow doubts about the legitimacy of the results — especially in a year in which the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, has told his supporters that the only way he will lose is if the election is “rigged,” and while campaign officials for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, have held a series of meetings about preparing for the possibility that the vote will be hacked. The White House has declined to name Russia publicly as the chief suspect in a series of recent hacks, and has worded its public warnings carefully. The greatest danger, Lisa O. Monaco, President Obama’s domestic security adviser, said on Wednesday, is from attempts to cause “concern or confusion” about the voting system.

National: Lawmakers weigh federal role in preventing election hacks | The Hill

The House Science Committee met Tuesday to discuss efforts to safeguard the November elections from hacking threats, with lawmakers pressing officials on the potential danger and the federal response. Concerns over an election hack have grown after recent breaches to Illinois and Arizona’s online voter registration databases and the Democratic National Committee email hack. “Rightly, we should be concerned about the integrity of our election system,” said Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who pressed witnesses on whether elections should be treated as critical infrastructure requiring federal support. “Typically, whatever we get involved with doesn’t run as well as if the state is doing it themselves,” he cautioned.

National: Can your vote be hacked—after you cast it? | The Parallax

In early August, Donald Trump began expressing fear that the U.S. presidential election would be “rigged” against him. “I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump told an audience in Columbus, Ohio. While much has been written about his remarks—as well as several others he made in the weeks following the Democratic National Convention—it remains an open question whether electronic databases storing votes can be hacked and manipulated. Voting has entered the digital era on two fronts. Electronic voting machines and, in some locations, Internet voting have introduced numerous opportunities for hackers to alter voting records. It is the security of massive spreadsheets recording the will of the people that concerns Richard Forno, a computer security expert who recently thrust himself into the national debate over the hackability of U.S. elections by publishing a column on the subject. “Everyone’s focusing on the edges of the network, the voting machines, but no one’s looking at the databases,” Forno, a career computer security expert and currently the director of the Graduate Cybersecurity Program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, tells The Parallax.

Georgia: Suit alleges Georgia blocked thousands of minority voters from rolls | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Less than a week before early voting starts in Georgia’s presidential election, a coalition of voting advocates filed suit Wednesday accusing Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp of disenfranchising thousands of residents by blocking their access to vote. Further, the lawsuit alleges that Georgia’s use of a strict matching process for voter registration has disproportionately affected minority voters across the state, meaning the voter registration applications of black, Latino and Asian Americans in Georgia are more likely than those of white applicants to be rejected. It is an accusation denied strongly by Kemp, who has traveled the state to tout the accessibility of Georgia’s elections.

Missouri: Voters will now get a say in voter ID, but law could still be challenged in court | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Missouri Republicans may have muscled through a voter ID law on Wednesday, but their veto session victory could be relatively short-lived, if court rulings in other states are any indication. Before any court challenges can be filed, however, voters will have their say. The vetoed law overridden by lawmakers this week is tied to a referendum on Nov. 8, when Missouri voters will be asked whether to amend the state constitution to require voter identification. If they approve, the law would go into effect in 2017. At issue is whether requiring Missouri residents to present a photo identification before voting disenfranchises certain groups, including people of color, the elderly, the poor and students. Missouri Republicans, like their GOP counterparts in other states, argue that showing a photo ID is a common-sense way to prevent voter fraud. Democrats say voter fraud isn’t a pervasive problem, and that voter ID legislation is merely a way to suppress minority voters who tend to support more liberal candidates. Recently, courts throughout the country have agreed.

Ohio: Supreme Court Won’t Restore ‘Golden Week’ Voting in Ohio | The New York Times

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to restore a period of early voting in Ohio during which people could register and vote on the same day. The court’s brief order came in response to an emergency application from Democratic groups. There were no noted dissents. The case, Ohio Democratic Party v. Husted, No. 16A223, has its roots in the 2004 general election, when Ohio voters faced exceptionally long lines, leaving them, in the words of one court, “effectively disenfranchised.” In response, the state adopted a measure allowing in-person early voting in the 35 days before Election Day. As registration in the state closes 30 days before Election Day, the measure introduced a brief period, known as the Golden Week, in which voters could register and vote at the same time.

Wisconsin: GOP operatives discussed ginning up ‘voter fraud’ reports | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Some of what is reported by the Guardian U.S. in its story on leaked John Doe documents had been previously disclosed, but there was also a good bit of new stuff. Most notably, the story broke the news that Harold Simmons, owner of NL Industries, a producer of the lead formerly used in paint, made three donations totaling $750,000 to the Wisconsin Club for Growth in 2011 and 2012. Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers then pushed through a measure intended to retroactively shield lead paint makers from liability. But that wasn’t all. Here are six other things that we found in the 1,352 pages of leaked records:

* Republican insiders discussed ginning up concerns over voter fraud in the days after then-Supreme Court Justice David Prosser narrowly defeated challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg in April 2011.

Austria: Election may come unstuck over glue problem on postal votes | The Guardian

Austria’s rerun presidential election, scheduled for 2 October, may be postponed on technical grounds because of problems with glue on postal votes coming unstuck, the country’s interior ministry has said. The election was originally held in May but the constitutional court ordered a repeat poll after the far-right Freedom party (FPO) successfully challenged the result due to procedural irregularities. The FPO candidate, Norbert Hofer, narrowly lost that vote to the former Green party leader Alexander Van der Bellen, who was running as an independent. Hofer has led in recent opinion polls. “If an apparent failure in production makes it impossible to properly conduct the election, then it is my duty as the highest-ranking executive of the electoral authority to immediately consider a postponement,” the interior minister, Wolfgang Sobotka, said in an emailed statement. An interior ministry spokeswoman said a decision was expected early next week.

Gabon: Cards Stacked Against Gabon’s Opposition in Election Challenge to Bongo | WPR

Most observers, myself included, expected Gabon’s incumbent president, Ali Bongo Ondimba, to win his country’s election late last month. Few, however—again including me—anticipated the degree of violence and apparent fraud that would accompany the process. Bongo is now reconsolidating power in the aftermath of an intensely contested election. If his victory stands, it will demonstrate that Gabon’s opposition has few tools with which to challenge the results, and that the international community has little will to sanction Bongo and his inner circle. When elections were held on Aug. 27, Bongo barely won. Gabon’s electoral framework stipulated that the winner needed a plurality, rather than a majority, of the vote. With the opposition surprisingly unified around one candidate, Jean Ping, a former African Union Commission chairman and Gabonese Cabinet minister, the election became a two-man race. The official results gave Bongo 49.8 percent and Ping 48.23 percent, with eight other candidates dividing the remaining roughly 2 percent of the vote.

Russia: Election remains far from truly free | Financial Times

Five years have passed since the street protests that erupted following what were widely perceived as rigged parliamentary elections in Russia. But recent events have already made clear that anyone hoping that the next election to the Duma, Russia’s lower house, on Sunday will be significantly freer and more open is set for disappointment. Just two weeks before the ballot, Russian authorities blacklisted the Levada Centre, the country’s last independent pollster, as a “foreign agent”, leaving it barely able to function. This was ostensibly for receiving foreign funding. More likely it was because Levada’s polls showed falling support for the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. Memories of the 2011 demonstrations are still fresh in President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. So Moscow has taken steps to make this poll appear a little more transparent and competitive. It is reverting to a mixed system for the first time since 2003. Half the seats will come from party lists, half from single-member districts, to restore local representation.

National: Appeals Court Blocks Proof-of-Citizenship Requirement for Voters in 3 States | Associated Press

A federal appeals court on Friday blocked Kansas, Georgia and Alabama from requiring residents to prove they are U.S. citizens when registering to vote using a national form. The 2-1 ruling is a victory for voting rights groups who said a U.S. election official illegally changed proof-of-citizenship requirements on the federal registration form at the behest of the three states. People registering to vote in other states are only required to swear that that they are citizens, not show documentary proof. The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia acted swiftly in the case, issuing a two-page, unsigned ruling just a day after hearing oral arguments. A federal judge in July had refused to block the requirement while the case is considered on the merits.

National: Paperless voting could fuel ‘rigged’ election claims | Politico

Voters in four competitive states will cast ballots in November on electronic machines that leave no paper trail — a lapse that threatens to sow distrust about a presidential election in which supporters of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have raised fears about hackers tampering with the outcome. The most glaring potential trouble spots include Pennsylvania, where the vast majority of counties still use ATM-style touchscreen voting machines without the paper backups that critics around the country began demanding more than a decade ago. It’s also a state where Trump and his supporters have warned that Democrats might “rig” the election to put Clinton in the White House, a claim they could use to attack her legitimacy if she wins. Similar paperless machines are used heavily in Georgia, where the presidential race appears unusually close, and to a much smaller extent in Virginia and Florida, both of which are phasing them out. Florida has almost entirely abandoned the electronic machines following a number of elections that raised red flags, including a close 2006 congressional race in which Democrats charged that as many as 16,000 votes went missing.

Editorials: The ugliest, most appalling spectacle in American politics | Eugene Robinson/Washington Post

Every once in a while, the curtains part and we get a glimpse of the ugliest, most shameful spectacle in American politics: the Republican Party’s systematic attempt to disenfranchise African-Americans and other minorities with voter ID laws and other restrictions at the polls. If you thought this kind of discrimination died with Jim Crow, think again. Fortunately, federal courts have blocked implementation of some of the worst new laws, at least for now. But the most effective response would be for black and brown voters to send the GOP a message by turning out in record numbers, no matter what barriers Republicans try to put in our way. The ostensible reason for these laws is to solve a problem that doesn’t exist — voter fraud by impersonation. Four years ago, you may recall, a Republican Pennsylvania legislator let slip the realreason for his state’s new voter ID law: to “allow” Mitt Romney to win the state. In the end, he didn’t. But Republicans tried mightily to discourage minorities, most of whom vote Democratic, from going to the polls.

Michigan: Supreme Court rejects Michigan ban on straight-ticket voting | The Washington Post

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to allow Michigan to ban voters from casting straight-ticket ballots in the coming election after lower courts found the prohibition was likely to discriminate against African Americans and result in long lines at the polls. The justices declined to get involved in a political controversy that began when the state’s Republican leadership passed a bill to end 125 years of straight-ticket voting, which allows a voter to vote for all candidates of a desired party by taking a single action. The Supreme Court gave no reason for its decision for turning down Michigan’s request that it be allowed to enforce the ban. But it was another sign that it will be difficult for those bringing election controversies to the court in advance of November to prevail. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would have granted the state’s request.

North Carolina: Elections Board Settles Fight Over Voting Guidelines | The New York Times

North Carolina’s state elections board settled a deeply partisan battle over this fall’s election rules on Thursday, largely rejecting a Republican-led effort to write local voting guidelines that would limit Democratic turnout in a political battleground state. The board’s decisions could influence the course of voting in a state where races for governor and United States senator are close, and where the two major presidential candidates are said to be dead even. After meeting for more than 11 hours, the Republican-controlled board imposed new election plans that expanded voting hours or added polling places — or sometimes both — in 33 of the state’s 100 counties. In the vast bulk of the counties, the sole Democratic member on the three-person election board was contesting voting rules that the Republican majority had approved.

Ohio: Ohio is home to 3 disputes over voting issues | Associated Press

One of the most critical battleground states in the presidential election is home to three disputes over voting issues that could affect when voters can start casting ballots and how ballots will get counted this fall. Groups have challenged Ohio’s cut to early voting, its ballot procedures, and its process for removing voters from its registration rolls. Here’s a look at the lawsuits in Ohio: A dispute over a law that trims a week of early voting is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state’s Democratic Party asked the court on Sept. 1. to suspend a ruling that would trim early voting opportunities. That lower court decision from last month upheld a law eliminating days in which people could register and vote at the same time, a period known as “golden week.”

Texas: State misleading voters on rules on IDs for voting, Department of Justice complains | Dallas Morning News

The U.S. Department of Justice accused Texas officials Tuesday of waging a misleading voter education campaign and squandering money the state was ordered to spend on clarifying the voting process for those without certain forms of government-issued ID. A federal judge will hear arguments on Monday In a letter filed in federal court, lawyers for the department said Texas was advertising a standard “incorrect and far harsher” than is accurate when describing the circumstances under which individuals without specific forms of ID are allowed to vote. The department said Texas officials are teaching citizens and poll officials that Texans without photo ID can still cast a ballot, but only if they truly “cannot” obtain certain forms of ID. In reality, Texans only need to sign a form claiming they have a “reasonable impediment” to obtaining those forms of ID in order to be allowed to vote. A reasonable impediment could include anything from a restrictive work schedule to a “family responsibilities.”

Washington: Challenger Podlodowski discovers open door into state’s voter database | Seattle Post Intelligencer

A yawning back-end pathway into the state’s voter registration database, through which private information could have been accessed, has been closed, thanks to the candidate challenging Secretary of State Kim Wyman. “Anyone with basic programming skills and knowledge about these weaknesses could conceivably (access) this data, look up and harvest private data from millions of Washingtonians,” Tina Podlodowski wrote Wednesday to the state’s chief information security officer (CISO). The information accessible via the back-end pathway included voters’ personal cell phone numbers, personal email addresses, ballot delivery types, and the coding used to message military and overseas voters.
Wyman’s office, without mentioning Podlodowski, put out a release Friday, saying: “The situation has been quickly rectified.” David Ammons, chief communications office for the secretary of state, later confirmed that the problem was first identified in a letter from Podlodowski.

Gabon: Post-election turmoil escalates with court bid for recount | AFP

Gabon’s Jean Ping took his bid to have a wafer-thin presidential election loss overturned to the country’s top court Friday, as President Ali Bongo blamed the opposition leader for creating a climate of violence. Days of riots followed the August 31 announcement handing Bongo a narrow victory with a margin of some 6,000 votes, and Ping warned of more trouble to come if the court, which has 15 days to decide, rejects his recount appeal. “I greatly fear that another false step by the Constitutional Court will be the cause of deep and long-lasting instability in Gabon,” Ping told hundreds of supporters in Libreville. “If the Constitutional Court ignores the reality of the Gabonese vote, the people, who would have nothing left to lose… will take the future into their own hands,” said Ping, who continues to refer to himself as “president-elect”.

Russia: Putin Shuts Down Last Russian Independent Pollster In Anticipation of Russian and US Elections | Forbes

Vladimir Putin has based his claim to legitimacy on his high favorability ratings, the anchor of which has been the “independent” Levada Center, headed by the prominent Russian sociologist, Lev Gudkov. Among Levada’s claim to impartiality is its ties with foreign academic heavy weights from top universities and think tanks. The Kremlin has other polling organizations, such as VTSIOM, but they are viewed as doing the bidding of the Russian government. A Levada finding of high Putin ratings is worth its weight in gold to Putin and his regime. He has decided to throw this asset to the wolves. On September 6, Putin’s Ministry of Justice classified the Levada Center a “foreign agent,” citing its foreign ties with Columbia, George Washington, and Columbia Universities and with polling organizations such as Gallup, MORI, and Ipsos. Levada stands accused of working in the interests of these foreign entities. Although the “foreign agent” label does not automatically shut down Levada, the September 6 issue of Kommersant cites Gudkov as stating “the work of our organization has been in fact stopped.” The content of the article, however, has mysteriously disappeared, meaning that the Kremlin does not want this news circulating. Moscow speaks (Govorit Moskva) confirms that Levada is appealing the foreign-agent classification and has ceased its polling work. In shutting down Levada, Putin can no longer claim high ratings confirmed by respected independent pollsters. His favorability ratings form the core of his regime. Putin could pay a high price for this move, but he has decided the benefits outweigh the costs.

National: Security Experts Voice Fears About Election Result Accuracy, Integrity | eWeek

The U.S. election system will likely face a significant trial this year, thanks to a summer of startling revelations including nation-state-linked attacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and state voter databases, along with a statement of no-confidence by the Republican nominee. The result has been a slew of media stories positing how the election could be hacked. The ongoing cyber-attacks and raised doubts will put states’ choice of voting technology under the microscope, with a focus on the security of voting systems and the ability to audit the results produced by those balloting systems, according to election security experts. Unfortunately, while all but five states now have at least some systems with a verifiable paper trail, more than half do not have meaningful post-election audits, according to Verified Voting, a group focused on improving election-system integrity and accuracy. “We would like to see post-election audits everywhere,” Pamela Smith, director of the group, told eWEEK. “There is actual research showing that being able to conduct a robust audit in a public way brings confidence in the election. A voter-verifiable paper ballot is a tool to instill confidence that the election has come to true result.”

National: Hackers hit Arizona, Illinois voter databases | USA Today

A suspected Russian hacker probed a voter registration database in Arizona and another unidentified attacker gained entry to one in Illinois this summer, election officials said, prompting the FBI to warn states their election boards should conduct vulnerability scans. The systems that count votes in elections were not compromised, officials said, and the hacks don’t appear to be politically motivated. Still, the breaches add to concerns such attacks could exploit the personal data of millions of voters for monetary or political gain. Those worries have been running high after July reports that the Democratic National Committee’s email system had been hacked, a breach U.S. intelligence officials believe was perpetrated by the Russian government. “We’re all very aware that it’s less than 80 days before an important election,” said Pamela Smith with Verified Voting, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for election transparency.

North Carolina: Inside the Republican creation of the North Carolina voting bill dubbed the ‘monster’ law | Washington Post

The emails to the North Carolina election board seemed routine at the time. “Is there any way to get a breakdown of the 2008 voter turnout, by race (white and black) and type of vote (early and Election Day)?” a staffer for the state’s Republican-controlled legislature asked in January 2012. “Is there no category for ‘Hispanic’ voter?” a GOP lawmaker asked in March 2013 after requesting a range of data, including how many voters cast ballots outside their precinct. And in April 2013, a top aide to the Republican House speaker asked for “a breakdown, by race, of those registered voters in your database that do not have a driver’s license number.” Months later, the North Carolina legislature passed a law that cut a week of early voting, eliminated out-of-precinct voting and required voters to show specific types of photo ID – restrictions that election board data demonstrated would disproportionately affect African Americans and other minorities.

Ohio: Democrats to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate Golden Week in voting suit | Cleveland Plain Dealer

The Ohio Democratic Party will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate Golden Week voting for the November presidential election. The request will be part of an appeal to the Supreme Court in a lawsuit challenging the state’s attempt to shorten the early voting period to eliminate the week. Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper, in a phone interview Wednesday, said the appeal will be filed quickly, perhaps in a matter of days. “There’s just no reason not to allow the same process that’s been place for the last two cycles,” Pepper said. “The least harmful path is to give a stay and leave in place what was involved (for presidential elections) in ’08 and ’12.” The Ohio Democratic Party and Montgomery and Cuyahoga County Democratic parties are challenging changes in state law that reduced the early voting period from 35 days to 28 days. The reduction eliminated Golden Week, the only time people could register to vote at their elections board and then vote early in-person the same day.

Texas: Attorney General withholds details of $2.5M voter ID education effort | Houston Chronicle

Texas is spending $2.5 million to spread the word about changes to its voter ID law before the November election but will not release details about how the money is being used. More than half of that taxpayer money will go toward an advertising campaign, according to court filings. Yet state officials will not say which markets they intend to target with television and radio spots. As part of its outreach effort, the state will send “digital tool kits” to an estimated 1,800 organizations across Texas to engage local communities on voter education. State officials will not identify those groups. And documents related to both have recently been sealed by a federal judge at the request of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.

Virginia: Republicans go back to court to fight governor on felon voting rights | The Washington Post

Republican legislative leaders on Thursday said they will take Gov. Terry McAuliffe to court once again over his efforts to restore voting rights to felons. The GOP leaders filed a contempt-of-court motion against McAuliffe (D), who last week announced that he had individually restored rights to 13,000 felons and was working to do the same for a total of more than 200,000. McAuliffe’s action last week came in response to a July ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court, which threw out a blanket clemency order that he had issued in April. The governor has described his latest move as a way to comply with the court’s order while addressing “an issue of basic justice.” But Republicans argue in the court filing that the practical effect of McAuliffe’s workaround is the same as the original, sweeping clemency order that the state Supreme Court declared unconstitutional.

Wisconsin: Some could have trouble getting ID near election | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin election officials raised concerns Tuesday that some voters won’t be able to get IDs in time to vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election — potentially violating a court order. In response, a Division of Motor Vehicles official said the state would use overnight mail to get people voting credentials in some cases to make sure they can more easily vote. Courts have kept Wisconsin’s voter ID law in place, but have ruled state officials must promptly provide free voting credentials to people who don’t have IDs, even if they lack birth certificates or other identity documents. Three members of the state Elections Commission said they were worried people who wait to obtain IDs until close to the election won’t be able to get them in time to have their votes counted.

China: China’s Hard Line on Hong Kong Democracy Faces Election Test | Bloomberg

Since thousands of Hong Kong students blocked city streets two years ago to protest a restrictive plan for promised elections, the government’s response to democratic demands hasn’t wavered: Put aside the political fights, enjoy being part of China, prosper together. That take-or-leave-it approach to managing Hong Kong will be put to the test Sunday, with almost 4 million voters eligible to choose 70 members of the former British colony’s Legislative Council. The once-in-four-year election has drawn almost 300 candidates as a new crop of more radical activists seek a platform to challenge Beijing and others urge a more accommodating approach to bridge widening political divides.

Gabon: Violence After Gabon Elections Leaves One Dead | The New York Times