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.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the 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.
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. 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. The Detroit News observed that Stein’s recount effort revealed that election administration in many places in Michigan is “rife with incompetence that results in the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters who cast ballots that don’t get counted”.
The North Carolina Governor has signed a bill passed in special session that creates a single board to oversee the state’s ethics, lobbying and elections administration. Computer hackers attempted to hold Henry County Ohio’s voter database for ransom just days before the Nov. 8 general election. A federal judge rejected a Green Party-backed request to recount paper ballots in Pennsylvania’s presidential election and scan some counties’ election systems for signs of hacking.
Dan Lopresti wrote about security issues in the voting machines used in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the country. A federal appeals court 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. European governments are bracing for cyber-meddling by Moscow in upcoming national elections in France, the Netherlands and Germany and Gambian President Yahya Jammeh 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.