Pennsylvania: Advocates Say Electronic Voting Machines Should Print Paper Ballots | WESA

Allegheny County has been held as a model for its handling of electronic voting testing and inspection. It’s the only county in Pennsylvania to conduct parallel testing, meaning an independent organization randomly selects machines on Election Day and simulates usage. Despite testing, some local groups aren’t convinced the machines are secure. Vote Allegheny Treasurer Secretary Audrey Glickman said the county needs to upgrade its system to one that prints a paper ballot. “Then we can have a statistically significant audit and have some means of recounting what the vote was,” Glickman said. “Right now we can’t recount the vote.”

Indonesia: E-Voting Touted for 2019 Election | Jakarta Globe

Measures to introduce e-voting for the 2019 presidential and legislative elections are being considered by some in the government, an official said on Monday (29/08). Soedarmo, director general of politics and general government at the Home Affairs Ministry, said the plan had been discussed between several ministries under the Coordinating Minister for Politics, Legal and Security. Speaking in Jakarta on Monday morning, Soedarmo tipped implementation for the 2019 election, but noted the government is yet to make a decision.

National: Swing States Reject Feds’ Offer to Cybersecure Voting Machines | Defense One

Some key swing states have declined an offer from the Homeland Security Department to scan voting systems for hackers ahead of the presidential elections. As suspected Russian-sponsored attackers compromise Democratic Party and other U.S. political data allegedly to sway voter opinion, some security experts say it wouldn’t even take the resources of a foreign nation to manipulate actual votes using this country’s antiquated tallying systems. Against this backdrop, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson during an Aug. 15 call with state election officials, offered states DHS services that can inspect voting systems for bugs and other hacker entryways. Earlier in the month, he also suggested the federal government label election systems as official U.S. critical infrastructure, like the power grid. But some battleground states, including Georgia and Pennsylvania, say they will rely on in-house security crews to maintain the integrity of voter data.

National: Data Shows Trump’s Election-Rigging Claim is Unlikely | Government Technology

… At a campaign rally in Altoona, Pa., on Aug. 12 [Trump] alleged that a poor showing could only mean one thing: “The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on. I really believe it.” Trump said, alluding to political subterfuge from the Clinton campaign. Since that rally, Trump has held to these assertions of foul play while his critics have cast them as highly dangerous for the democratic process. However, for those close to the matter — voting officials and voters’ rights groups — the conspiracy theory is a bit bewildering. Pamela Smith, the president of VerifiedVoting.org, is among these. Her organization — a nonpartisan voting advocacy, accountability and research group — has gained notoriety since it was founded in 2003 for its work tracking election tech, legislation and voting procedures. In this time, Smith said incidents of voter fraud and rigged elections have been nearly nonexistent. “It’s frustrating because I think a lot of people may get the mistaken impression that there are some major areas of vulnerability,“ Smith said. “But they may not be aware of things election officials do already, or the true scope of the issue.” A look at current and historical data, said Smith, indicates that the potential for cheating is uniquely limited. Voter ID fraud is nearly nonexistent; purchasing votes is too tricky to cover up, at least at a national or county level; and hacking voting machines and software is ineffectual since usage of the systems is low and controlled. “Because our elections are really decentralized, it’s also not like there’s a single point of vulnerability out of 9,000 jurisdictions we have in the U.S.,” Smith said.

National: Hack the vote: How attackers could meddle in November’s elections | Network World

Political action committees aren’t the only entities attempting to influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Supposedly, Russia wants a say in who should lead the country. At least that’s the opinion you could form after reading the many news stories that allege Russia is behind the recent hacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Attack attribution aside (I shared my thoughts on that topic in last month’s blog), these data breaches raise the question of whether attackers could actually impact an election’s outcome. Not to scare you, but hacking the vote is pretty easy. Some possible ways of carrying this out, like hacking electronic voting machines, have been discussed extensively, while others, such as targeting organizations that poll voters, probably haven’t been considered. I’m not trying to frighten people by bringing up these scenarios. As far as I know, none of the methods I’m going to discuss have been used to sway an election. To me, this is an opportunity to present these possible situations to the security community and, by freely talking about them, ensure that voting goes as smoothly as possible on November 8.

National: There’s work to be done to make US elections secure — and it has nothing to do with voter ID | Public Radio International

Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the government was considering classifying voting systems part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” a designation currently held by systems such as the electric grid and banking networks. The announcement comes on the heels of reports of a vast infiltration of Democratic Party servers. “Everything we know about voting machines — electronic ones, computerized ones, is they’re not very secure,” says tech security expert Bruce Schneier. “They are not tested, they are not designed rigorously and in many cases there’s no way to detect or recover from fraud. So there really is a disaster waiting to happen.” Aviel Rubin, a professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins University, agrees. “Unfortunately, I think the thing that’s improved the most in the last 10 years is the sophistication of the hackers and the number of incidents that we see that are occurring daily. If you look at the news you see that ransomware is becoming pretty common,” Rubin says. “The big change that I’ve seen has been just how sophisticated the hackers are today. And they’re sponsored by countries like Russia and China, which is a much more formidable adversary than we had in the past.”

National: After DNC Hack, Cybersecurity Experts Worry About Old Machines, Vote Tampering | NPR

Security experts say that Russian hackers have broken into the computers of not only the Democratic National Committee but other targets as well. This has raised a new wave of concerns that on Election Day, the votes themselves could be compromised by hackers, potentially tipping the results. Most states have returned to paper-backed voting systems in recent years, but that still leaves vulnerable a number of states that rely solely on machines. Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, tells NPR’s Scott Simon that without these paper-backed systems, up to 15 states could be putting their election results at risk. That’s a possible reach of 60 million voters — “enough to swing an election,” Tufekci says. In my old workplace — at Princeton University at the Center for Information Technology Policy — we had this lounging area with comfy couches, and researchers had decorated the place with a voting machine that had been hacked to play Pac-Man instead of counting votes. … And when they hacked this, the machine had been in use in jurisdictions around the country with more than 9 million voters.

Editorials: Voting machines should be seen as critical democracy infrastructure | Gregory Miller/The Hill

At the Open Source Election Technology Foundation (OSET), a 10-year old Silicon Valley based nonprofit election technology research institute, we are encouraged by valuable dialog underway about how to protect America’s aging and vulnerable voting machinery and evolve our systems with technology for ease and confidence. Setting aside some misunderstanding about the challenges elections officials face in administering a nationwide patchwork quilt of election technology, there is a critical mass on the left and the right discussing how to protect our “critical democracy infrastructure.” Part of the problem is that by design, our nation’s voting infrastructure is a balkanized system comprised of a small number of vendors’ machinery, combined with a variety of ways of casting and counting ballots. While a large-scale national attack is highly unlikely, such would be unnecessary to derail a general election. In fact, it only requires a targeted attack of a few machines in a key county of a swing State.

National: A Cyber-Attack on a U.S. Election is Inevitable | International Policy Digest

Since Direct Recording Electronic voting machines first came into vogue in the U.S. in 2002, a team of cyber-academics (known as the Princeton Group) has been busy demonstrating how easy it is to hack these machines, to remind American citizens just how cyber-vulnerable the voting process is. From their first successful hack into a DRE 15 years ago, they surmised that it was just a matter of time until a cyber-attack occurred in a national election. This summer’s cyberattack of the Democratic National Committee has shed light on how such events can potentially affect this, and future, elections. Given the apparent ease with which the attack occurred on the DNC, is there any real reason to believe the same cannot, or will not, occur in November?

National: Voting Machines Are a Mess—But the Feds Have a (Kinda) Plan | WIRED

America’s voting machines are a patchwork of systems spread across thousands of districts, with widely varying degrees of accountability. It’s a mess. One that the Department of Homeland Security has finally committed to helping clean up. This week, DHS chief Jeh Johnson held a call with state election officials to outline, very roughly, the kind of assistance that DHS will provide to help prevent cyber attacks in this fall’s elections. For now, details are vague, and whatever DHS plans to do will need to happen quickly; election day may be November 8, but in some states, early voting starts in just six weeks. That’s not enough time to solve all of America’s voting machine issues. Fortunately, there’s still plenty DHS can accomplish—assuming the districts that need the most help realize it. The problems with America’s electronic voting machines are extensive, but also easily summarized: Many of them are old computers, and old computers are more vulnerable to disruptions both purposeful (malware) and benign (bugs).

National: Hacking the US Election ‘Possible’ But Difficult, Experts Say | VoA News

As recently as 2014, you could drive into the parking lot at certain Virginia polling places, connect to the voting machines inside by Wi-Fi and have your way with the vote tallies. That gaping hole in election security has been plugged. Virginia dropped these machines last year. But with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggesting the November election may be rigged, and security officials blaming Russia for a politically sensitive hack of the Democratic National Committee, election cybersecurity is getting a closer look. The risks are real, experts say, though it’s another question how likely they are to happen. “It’s possible for a sophisticated attacker to hack the machines and start stealing votes,” says University of California at Berkeley computer science professor David Wagner. Wagner worked on a 2007 statewide review of California’s voting system. “Every voting machine that’s been studied is susceptible,” he says. “It would be challenging,” he adds. “It would require considerable technical sophistication. And it would require someone to be physically present in each county, tampering with at least one machine.

Verified Voting Blog: Security against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence

This article was originally posted to Freedom to Tinker on August 17, 2016.

There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked.  Should the U.S. Government designate all the states’ and counties’ election computers as “critical cyber infrastructure” and prioritize the “cyberdefense” of these systems?  Will it make any difference to activate those buzzwords with less than 3 months until the election? First, let me explain what can and can’t be hacked.  Election administrators use computers in (at least) three ways:

  1. To maintain voter registration databases and to prepare the “pollbooks” used at every polling place to list who’s a registered voter (for that precinct); to prepare the “ballot definitions” telling the voting machines who are the candidates in each race.
  2. Inside the voting machines themselves, the optical-scan counters or touch-screen machines that the voter interacts with directly.
  3. When the polls close, the vote totals from all the different precincts are gathered (this is called “canvassing”) and aggregated together to make statewide totals for each candidate (or district-wide totals for congressional candidates).

Any of these computers could be hacked.  What defenses do we have?  Could we seal off the internet so the Russians can’t hack us?  Clearly not; and anyway, maybe the hacker isn’t the Russians—what if it’s someone in your opponent’s political party?  What if it’s a rogue election administrator?

To maintain voter registration databases and to prepare the “pollbooks” used at every polling place to list who’s a registered voter (for that precinct); to prepare the “ballot definitions” telling the voting machines who are the candidates in each race.
Inside the voting machines themselves, the optical-scan counters or touch-screen machines that the voter interacts with directly.
When the polls close, the vote totals from all the different precincts are gathered (this is called “canvassing”) and aggregated together to make statewide totals for each candidate (or district-wide totals for congressional candidates).
Any of these computers could be hacked. What defenses do we have? Could we seal off the internet so the Russians can’t hack us? Clearly not; and anyway, maybe the hacker isn’t the Russians—what if it’s someone in your opponent’s political party? What if it’s a rogue election administrator?

National: Experts Fear Possible Voting Machine Tampering in November | CNC News

A group of cyber security experts say they fear that voting machines in the U.S. could be a target for hackers. “Coming out of the [Democratic National Committee] hack … I think there’s a lot of us trying to call more attention to the election machines,” Jason Healey, a Columbia University senior research scholar and non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative said on Wednesday. Healey, who was in Washington, D.C., as part of the council’s “Cyber Risk Wednesday” series, pointed out the difference between how gambling machines in Las Vegas are secured compared to voting machines. “Someone tweeted out: ‘Here’s how Las Vegas handles gambling machines.’ It covered all these controls that Las Vegas includes for [them]… “Someone can inspect it. If you as a player think that the [gambling] machine is fraudulent, you can go talk to the inspector. There are rules. There [is] independent testing to see if it’s right,” Healey said.

Pennsylvania: Aging voting machines prompt concern about election security | CNHI

Decade-old voting machines in much of the state are creating concern as they age, with lawmakers now urging a review of the systems. This comes as Pennsylvania’s widespread use of touch-screen voting is viewed with suspicion by supporters of Donald Trump. Many already feel the Republican presidential nominee is campaigning up-stream, and Trump has suggested that if he loses, it will be because voting systems in Pennsylvania and elsewhere are rigged. “I think paper ballots that the voter fills in circles with ink that are read by optical scanners would be a good way to go,” said Rep. Brad Roae, R-Crawford County, a member of the House State Government Committee. Roae attended Trump’s Erie rally on Friday and has said he supports the nominee.

Editorials: The Election Won’t Be Rigged. But It Could Be Hacked. | Zeynep Tufecki /The New York Times

Voting isn’t a game, of course, and we need to trust the machines that count our votes. Especially this year. Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, raised the possibility of “rigged” elections, and his former adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. has warned of a “blood bath” in such a case. A recent poll found that 34 percent of likely voters believed the general election would be rigged. It’s unclear what mechanism the Trump campaign envisions for this rigging. Voter fraud through impersonation or illegal voting is vanishingly rare in the United States, and rigging the election by tampering with voting machines would be nearly impossible. As President Obama pointed out in a news conference last week, where he called charges of electoral rigging “ridiculous,” states and cities set up voting systems, not the federal government. That’s true, and it means the voting machine landscape is a patchwork of different systems, which makes the election hard to manipulate in a coordinated way. But it’s still a bleak landscape.

Editorials: Protect Our Voting Machines From Hackers | Lawrence Norden/NBC News

In the last two weeks, there have been credible reports that Russia is attempting to influence our elections by hacking into the Democratic Party’s email server and other campaign files. These reports are troubling. But an attack on our country’s voting machines, once deemed far-fetched, is even more disturbing. In response, the Obama administration is considering designating America’s electronic voting system as “critical infrastructure,” which would likely bring more federal resources to protecting these systems from attack. But with just three months before the presidential election, what can be done? In truth, making big changes to election machinery before this November isn’t realistic. There isn’t enough time. Fortunately, security experts and activists have worked for several years to shore up election integrity, and there is much we can do to secure the technology currently in place. In the short term, election jurisdictions must review their security measures with experts in the next three months. One of the great victories of security specialists and advocates in the last few years was convincing jurisdictions to move from paperless computerized voting machines to machines that have some kind of voter verified paper trail. This November, 80 percent of citizens will vote on paper ballots that are read by electronic scanners, or touch screen machines that produce a paper trail that can be reviewed by the voter before she casts her vote. This should deter would-be hackers looking to alter the result of an election: the paper record can be used to check the totals provided by the machine and catch incorrect results.

Pennsylvania: Lawmakers examine election codes, voting machine legislation | WITF

State lawmakers Tuesday held a rare summer meeting to discuss updating guidelines on voting machine technology. Meanwhile, some elections officials took the opportunity to try and convince the legislators to make broader changes to the commonwealth’s election codes. Wes Perry, assistant director of Elections in Washington County, spoke at Tuesday’s meeting. He said most of the state’s voting machines were bought with a federal grant about a decade ago, and are due to be replaced soon.

Pennsylvania: Aging voting machines pose a future cause for concern in some counties | PennLive

People often complain about long lines when they go to cast their vote on Election Day, particularly in presidential election years, but imagine how much worse it would be if large numbers of the state’s aging voting machines broke down and parts to fix them were hard to come by. It’s that type of scenario that Sen. Elder Vogel, R-Beaver County, hopes to avoid. He authored a resolution calling for a study on aging voting machines in the state that the Senate adopted last month. It directs the Joint State Government Commission to complete the study within the next 18 months and issue its findings and recommendations. County election officials are already “scavenging parts” when problems arise, he said. He wants to be proactive “before it becomes a crisis.” Barry Kauffman, a senior adviser to Common Cause Pennsylvania, agrees this is an issue that needs to be dealt with – and soon. “We know these machines are aging out … some of the software isn’t even serviced anymore,” Kauffman said. “There is a serious need to protect the integrity of our elections.” Along with that, he would like to see more voting machines that are user-friendly and ensure votes are counted correctly. “In the end, we need timely, accurate results,” he said.

National: How Hackers Could Destroy Election Day | The Daily Beast

Stealing and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee could be just the start. Hacking the presidential election itself could be next, a bipartisan group of former intelligence and security officials recently warned. Whomever was behind the DNC hack also could target voting machines and the systems for tabulating votes, which are dangerously insecure. “Election officials at every level of government should take this lesson to heart: our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups,” wrote 31 members of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, which includes a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a former secretary of Homeland Security. That echoes warnings computer security experts have been sounding for more than a decade: that the system for casting and counting votes in this country is also ripe for mischief. … Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow military personnel and overseas voters to return their ballots electronically, according to Verified Voting, a non-profit group that advocates transparency and security in U.S. elections. “The election official on the receiving end has no way to know if the voted ballot she received matches the one the voter originally sent,” the group warns. Some ballots are sent through online portals, which exposes the voting system to the internet. And that’s one of the most dangerous things elections officials can do, because it provides a remote point of access for hackers into the election system.

National: Hacker threat extends beyond parties | Politico

The furor over the cyberattacks injecting turmoil into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign obscures a more pervasive danger to the U.S. political process: Much of it has only lax security against hackers, with few if any federal cops on the beat. No one regulator is responsible for requiring campaigns, political operations and state and local agencies to protect the sanctity of the voter rolls, voters’ personal data, donors’ financial information or even the election outcomes themselves. And as the Democrats saw in Philadelphia this past week, the result can be chaos. The most extreme danger, of course, is that cyber intruders could hack the voting machinery to pick winners and losers. But even less-ambitious exploits could sway the results in a close election — anything from tampering with parties’ volunteer schedules and get-out-the-vote operations to deleting the registrations of frequent voters or knocking registration databases offline. Cyber scams aimed at campaign donors’ financial data, such as a just-disclosed hack aimed at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, could deter future contributors by making them fear identity theft. Or, as happened this past week to the Democratic National Committee, online thieves could get hold of a political operation’s embarrassing internal emails, creating headaches for a presidential candidate just before she accepts her party’s nomination.

National: Trump, Putin and the hacking of an American election | The Boston Globe

Did Republican nominee Donald Trump just ask Russian strongman Vladimir Putin to cast the deciding vote in the US presidential election? On Wednesday morning, Trump said he hoped Russia would find and publish 30,000 e-mail messages deleted by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, from the personal server she used as secretary of state. It was a startling spectacle: a presidential candidate urging a foreign government to play a role in America’s game of thrones. But there’s a chance Putin is already a player. The trove of embarrassing e-mails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, which were leaked to the press just in time for this week’s party convention in Philadelphia, were probably swiped by Russian hackers, according to US intelligence officials and independent cybersecurity companies. Russia’s apparent election tampering — and Trump’s call for the Russians to expose Clinton’s deleted e-mails — shows that the insecurity of America’s data networks could undermine our ability to hold free and fair elections. But if the Russian president would go this far to pick our next president, why not take the direct approach? Why not tamper with the computers that manage the nation’s voting systems? Maybe that has already happened. Those voting systems are certainly vulnerable.

Editorials: After DNC hack, the case for paper ballots | Glenn Reynolds/USA Today

Somebody — probably, though not certainly, Vladimir Putin’s intelligence apparatus — has hacked the Democratic Committee’s email servers and released some of what it found via the Wikileaks site. As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith notes, this is something new: Although meddling in foreign elections is old stuff for intelligence agencies (including our own), this sort of email release is unprecedented. As disruptive as the DNC email release has been, there’s room for something much worse: A foreign government could hack voting machines, shut down election computers, or delete or alter voter registration information, turning Election Day into a snarled mess and calling the results into question regardless of who wins. Worse yet, hackers are already working on this. Voting systems rely on trust. Voters have to trust that their own vote is recorded and counted accurately; they also have to trust that the overall count is accurate, and that only eligible voters are allowed to vote. (When an ineligible voter casts a vote, it cancels out the vote of a legitimate voter every bit as much as if his or her ballot had simply been shredded.) The problem is that electronic systems — much less the Internet-based systems that some people are talking about moving to — can’t possibly provide that degree of reliability. They’re too easy to hack, and alterations are too easy to conceal. If the powers-that-be can’t protect confidential emails, or government employees’ security information, then they can’t guarantee the sanctity of voting systems.

Botswana: Indian company may grab electronic voting tender | Mmegi Online

Various stakeholders, including political parties, analysts and the media, joined Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) officials to sample the stand-alone electronic vote machine, which is expected to be debuted at the 2019 general elections. To avoid disruptions during the power cuts, the machines use batteries, and are not connected to a data network. The portable and light machine allows a voter to first check if they have voted for a party of their choice before selecting a candidate by pressing a button. While several companies were invited to demonstrate their own voting machines yesterday, only Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) turned up, with analysts saying this placed the Indian company in poll position for the tender to supply the machines. BEL machines are already in use in Namibia, one of the few African countries using electronic voting.

India: Government exploring involving start-ups to make EVMs and VVPAT units | Business Standard News

With an eye on better technology and competitive prices, the government is exploring possibility of involving start-ups to make EVMs with the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) units, which are being currently produced by the PSUs Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) and Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL), said informed sources. The decision to rope in the start-ups for producing the EVMs coupled with paper trail machines was taken following the cabinet decision to allocate Rs 920 crore for the purchase of the EVMs by the Election Commission. The only caveat is that machines to be produced by the start-ups will have to comply with the security requirements, they said.

India: High Court Seeks Responses On Removing Party Symbols From Voting Machines | NDTV

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought reply from the Centre, State Election Commission and the AAP government on a plea for removal of party symbols of candidates from Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) in municipal corporation polls in the National Capital. A bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Sangita Dhingra Sehgal issued notices to the authorities concerned and asked them to file short counter affidavits within six weeks. The court has now posted the matter for September 28. The plea filed by law student Sanjana Gahlot and advocate Hargyan Singh Gahlot has sought directions for inclusion of photographs of contesting candidates on the EVM.

National: How Technology Is Shaping Voter Registration and the Election Process for States and Localities | StateTech Magazine

As Hennepin County, Minn., prepares to implement its new electronic poll book system in August, one of election officials’ main concerns has been how to train poll workers. The workers are wonderful, says Hennepin County Elections Manager Ginny Gelms, but many are older and not very comfortable using technology. Those worries proved unfounded when the poll workers in a neighboring county’s pilot project said they would return only if they could use the electronic poll books again. “That was a real eye-opener for me,” Gelms says. “It just makes their jobs so much easier that they love it.” This year’s presidential race has been unprecedented in many regards, but it’s not just the candidates who are making history. From registering voters online and nominating candidates during the conventions to casting ballots at the polls, new advances in technology continue to transform the election process. Jurisdictions throughout the country are hard at work modernizing outdated election systems, with new technologies that cut the time and cost of inputting registration data, reduce data entry errors, ensure citizens can’t vote more than once and make voting faster, easier and more convenient.

Voting Blogs: Working with observers to improve voting system reliability | David Levine/electionlineWeekly

The goals of election observation are enhanced public confidence in the efficiency and integrity of the election process, and more efficient election operations. Any voting system — whether an optical scan paper ballot system, a Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) system, or something else — has to function for the duration of the voting process, and election observers are trained to spot situations in which malfunctions, power outages, lengthy-set up times or other problems prevent voters from casting their votes, discourage them from doing do so, or cause votes already cast to be lost. Election observers look at how voting machines protect against malfunctions, whether election officials can easily repair basic problems, and whether officials have been trained to deal with problems that arise during the voting process. This means that one way to improve the reliability of voting systems in the United States is to have election officials work more closely with election observers.

California: Touchscreen ballots and a choice in polling stations could be the future of voting in L.A. County | Los Angeles Times

A few weeks after a primary election riddled with polling-day issues, Los Angeles County officials announced they’ve completed the first phase of a major planned overhaul of the county’s voting system. County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan envisions a future system in which, instead of being directed to designated polling stations on a single Tuesday, voters will be able to choose from hundreds of voting centers around the county during a 10-day window leading up to election day. There, instead of marking their selections with pen and paper, they will enter their selections on touch-screen ballot-marking devices, print out a paper ballot to review their selections, and feed the ballot back into the machine to be stored and counted. The county began exploring a redesign of the system in 2009. In 2014, the county Board of Supervisors approved a $15-million contract with the Bay Area design firm IDEO. The planning and design process has cost $14 million to date, Logan said.

California: Los Angeles County unveils new voting system prototype | SCV Signal

A new voting system prototype for Los Angeles County, which will replace a system based on technology from the 1960s, was unveiled Thursday in the city of Los Angeles. “Today’s event was received with great excitement,” said Brenda Duran, a spokeswoman with the Los Angeles County Voting Systems Assessment Project, established in 2009 to create the new voting system. “L.A. County’s core system that is used today has been in existence for almost 60 years. People are excited for a new system.” The new voting system will replace the current one known as “InkaVote Plus.” One of the main drawbacks of the current system: It does not allow for any technical upgrades. “Because of the technology, we knew it was time to replace it,” Project Manager Monica Flores said. She added that with limited voting system options, the county decided to design a whole new system.

India: Electronic Voting Machines successfully tracked using mobile technology | Hindustan Times

Meghalaya has successfully conducted an exercise to ensure that mobile technology is implemented during elections across the state to track EVMs as per the instruction of the Election Commission. A pilot exercise was initiated successfully for 330 numbers of balloting units and for 288 numbers of control units in West Jaintia Hills district as per instructions of the EC,” Meghalaya chief electoral officer Frederick R Kharkongor told PTI on Friday. During the exercise the EVMs were tagged with bar codes and subsequently mobile phones were used to upload information and unique IDs of each and every EVM, he said, adding the same was immediately uploaded to a mobile application linked to a server located at Election Commission.