The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly May 28 – June 3 2012

Flame - Massive Cyber Threat Uncovered

A Federal judge struck down restrictions on third party voter registration drives that had been signed into law last year on the4 same day that the Justice Department ordered the State to end a controversial purge of the State’s voter rolls. Republican Super PACs plan to spend a record $1 billion this November. Maryland is considering the use of of online ballot marking software in spite of the fact that no such software has been tested and certified to voting system standards. Researchers have identified that highly sophisticated malware, dubbed Flame, designed for cyber espionage has been active since 1010. Two closely watched elections are scheduled for June 5: California’s primary will be the first using a “top two” system that may doom third parties in the State and Wisconsin’s recall election has attracted massive National attention – and funding. After an inconclusive first round, Egypt heads for a divisive run-off pitting an Islamist candidate against a former member of the Mubarak regime, while Lesotho elections were generally peaceful in which ex-foreign minister Tom Thabane forming a coalition government.

Florida: Part of controversial Florida voter registration law struck down; votor roll purge ordered halted | Bradenton Herald
National: GOP Super PACs plan record $1 billion blitz | Politico.com
Maryland: Election board looks at online ballot marking | MarylandReporter.com
National: Flame: Massive, advanced cyber threat uncovered | GovInfo Security
Wisconsin: Recall Election: Political Money Talks | NYTimes.com
California: Minor parties facing extinction under new voting system | San Jose Mercury News
Editorials: Egypt Elections – a Choice Between Islamic Dictatorship and Military Authoritarianism | allAfrica.com
Lesotho: Tiny Lesotho holds peaceful election | CSMonitor.com

Jun 02, 2012
Florida: Part of controversial Florida voter registration law struck down; votor roll purge ordered halted | Bradenton Herald

A federal judge Thursday struck down a key part of Florida’s recently revamped election laws, saying the Legislature’s restrictions have made it “risky business” for third-party groups to register new voters. Hours later, the Justice Department ordered Florida’s elections division to halt a systematic effort to find and purge the state’s rolls of noncitizen voters. Florida’s effort appears to violate both the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act — which governs voter purges — T. Christian Herren Jr., the Justice Department’s lead civil rights lawyer, wrote in a detailed two-page letter sent late Thursday night. State officials said they were reviewing the letter. But they indicated they might fight the Justice Department over its interpretation of federal law and expressed frustration that President Barack Obama’s administration has stonewalled the state’s noncitizen voter hunt for nine months.

Earlier in the day, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle told the state it cannot require groups to submit voter registration forms within 48 hours or face $1,000 fines. Nor can the state force those groups to disclose names of volunteers who don’t collect the forms, Hinkle ruled. ”The short deadline, coupled with substantial penalties for noncompliance, make voter registration drives a risky business,” Hinkle wrote. “If the goal is to discourage voter registration drives and thus make it harder for new voters to register, the 48-hour deadline may succeed.” Hinkle said voter registration activity is protected speech under the First Amendment. His injunction means that groups will have 10 days to submit voter forms, as they did before the law was changed.

Full Article: Part of controversial voter registration law struck down; votor roll purge ordered halted | Elections | Bradenton Herald.

Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations. That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been expected to commit. Just the spending linked to the Koch network is more than the $370 million that John McCain raised for his entire presidential campaign four years ago. And the $1 billion total surpasses the $750 million that Barack Obama, one of the most prolific fundraisers ever, collected for his 2008 campaign.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, proved its potency by spending nearly $50 million in the primaries. Now able to entice big donors with a neck-and-neck general election, the group is likely to meet its new goal of spending $100 million more. And American Crossroads and the affiliated Crossroads GPS, the groups that Rove and Ed Gillespie helped conceive and raise cash for, are expected to ante up $300 million, giving the two-year-old organization one of the election’s loudest voices. “The intensity on the right is white-hot,” said Steven Law, president of American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. “We just can’t leave anything in the locker room. And there is a greater willingness to cooperate and share information among outside groups on the center-right.”

In targeted states, the groups’ activities will include TV, radio and digital advertising; voter-turnout work; mail and phone appeals; and absentee- and early-ballot drives. The $1 billion in outside money is in addition to the traditional party apparatus – the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee – which together intend to raise at least $800 million.

Full Article: GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz – Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei – POLITICO.com….

The State Board of Elections may move to implement an online ballot marking system for all absentee voters in time for this year’s elections, depending on an opinion from the attorney general. But some voter advocacy groups worry about the potential for fraud. The move to online ballot marking comes after a 2010 federal mandate that required states to provide overseas voters and active military personnel with access to online absentee ballot applications. The attorney general’s opinion, requested by Sen. Edward Kasemeyer, would say whether or not the elections board should seek federal and state certification for the online ballot marking tool. The board staff is currently developing the device through a Department of Defense grant. Certification would test the system and look for vulnerable areas, including where fraud or manipulation could occur. All whole voting systems are federally required to receive certification, but the state board argues the ballot marking tool would be only part of a voting system.

Some critics, including the voter integrity group SaveOurVotes, say that without proper federal and state certification, there is a high risk for voter fraud and a potential breach of security of voter information. “Voting system certification requirements exist to ensure that voting equipment conforms to consistent standards that safeguard our elections against tampering and error,” SaveOurVotes Co-Director Rebecca Wilson wrote in an April 30 letter to Attorney General Douglas Gansler. “Waiving certification requirements for such an undeveloped and untested system as this would set a dangerous precedent.”

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) offered an informal opinion on the matter in February at the request of State Elections Board Administrator Linda Lamone. The commission staff said that an online ballot marking wizard did not meet the definition of a voting system and therefore “was not considered eligible for testing and certification under the EAC program.” The Election Assistance Commission is supposed to have a five-member board, but it hasn’t had a quorum since December 2010 and currently has no board members serving.

Full Article: Maryland election board looks at online ballot marking – MarylandReporter.com….

Highly sophisticated malware being used to spy on several countries, mostly in the Middle East, that has been around for more than two years has been discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the research arm of the Russian security products company announced May 28. Detected by researchers as Worm.Win32.Flame – or more simply, Flame – it’s designed to carry out cyber espionage and steal valuable information, including, but not limited to, computer display contents, information about targeted systems, stored files, contact data and audio conversations, Kaspersky Lab says.Kaspersky Lab’s chief security expert, Alex Gostev, characterizes Flame as a super-cyberweapon such as Stuxnet and Duqu, and in his blog contends it’s “one of the most complex threats ever discovered. It’s big and incredibly sophisticated. It pretty much redefines the notion of cyberwar and cyberespionage.”

Gostev identifies Flame’s targets as: Iran, Israel and/or Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Nearly half of the 382 Flame attacks identified by Gostev targeted facilities in Iran. Roger Thompson, chief emerging threats researcher for ICSA Labs, also identifies organizations in Hungary as being targeted. Gostev says from Kaspersky’s initial analysis, the creators of Flame are looking for any kind of intelligence: e-mails, documents, messages, discussions inside sensitive locations, “pretty much everything. We have not seen any specific signs indicating a particular target such as the energy industry – making us believe it’s a complete attack toolkit designed for general cyber-espionage purposes.”

There doesn’t seem to by a visible pattern in the type of organization Flame targets, he says, adding that victims include individuals, government-related organizations and educational institutions. Thompson, in his blog, that Flame portends ill for its victims. “One of the tenets of computer security is that if a skilled hacker is in your networks for long enough, you can never get them out again, because they know more about your network than you do, and these hackers , were skilled… highly skilled,” he says.

Full Article: Flame: Massive, advanced cyber threat uncovered.

As Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin faces a well deserved recall votenext month after stripping public unions of their bargaining rights, voters are discovering the generosity of Diane Hendricks. Ms. Hendricks, the billionaire chairwoman of the nation’s largest roofing and siding wholesaler, wrote a check for $500,000 last month to help defend Governor Walker, a Republican, against his Democratic challenger, Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee. The eye-popping donation was made possible by a quirk in the state law for recall campaigns. And Ms. Hendricks has never been shy about what she wants. A newly released piece of documentary video shows her running into Governor Walker two weeks after he took office in 2011. In what was presumed to have been a private discussion, Ms. Hendricks asked, “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions and become a right to work” state?

Governor Walker replied, “Oh, yeah,” and he discussed a “divide and conquer” strategy, beginning with collective bargaining for public employees. “That opens the door once we do that,” he said. Mr. Walker, busy as he is with recall, has not taken aim at private-sector unions. But, as an assemblyman, he favored a right-to-work law that would have barred unions from collecting dues from nonmembers.

Full Article: Political Money Talks – NYTimes.com….

They’ve been a colorful part of California’s political landscape for decades — Greens, Libertarians, American Independents and members of the Peace and Freedom Party. But after Tuesday’s election, most of them will be all but invisible — and perhaps on their way to extinction. In past years, minor parties held their own primary elections to choose nominees who would go on to compete with Democratic and Republican nominees in general elections. But that’s no longer the case under California’s new “top two” primary system, in which all voters choose from among all candidates of all parties — and only the two candidates who get the most votes advance to November, regardless of party. Because minor party candidates rarely finish in the top two, and it’s now harder for their candidates to get on the primary ballot in the first place, the parties will have little or no presence on the general-election ballot. And in politics, invisibility means oblivion. ”It could spell the end of the Peace and Freedom Party,” said party chairman C.T. Weber, 71, of Sacramento. “It’s a shame that democracy is being undermined by this, but that’s the reality if we’re not able to overturn the law.”

The law was set in place with Proposition 14 in June 2010, approved by 54 percent of voters after then-state Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, forced the Legislature’s Democratic majority to put it on the ballot in exchange for his budget vote. Though minor parties complained from the get-go that they would be marginalized if not obliterated by the measure, voters liked the measure’s stated purpose: increasing primary voters’ choices in an effort to moderate the harsh political partisanship plaguing Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

Maldonado argued recently that minor parties will get more exposure in the new top-two primary and “if they represent the views of a significant number of voters in a district, they’ll be in the top two. … I don’t care what party you’re from, if you have a message that resonates with the people, they’re going to vote for you.” But minor-party officials contend that giving voters only two choices in November — with no write-in votes allowed — denies parties an opportunity to spread their messages and hobbles their ability to field candidates in the future. ”It’s not a good situation,” in part because it’s a lot harder to recruit candidates, said Kevin Takenaga, chairman of the Libertarian Party of California.

Full Article: California’s minor parties facing extinction under new voting system – San Jose Mercury News.

For the next and final round of presidential elections, Egyptians are being asked to choose between an Islamic or military dictatorship both claiming legitimacy through the ballot box. Egypt may be following one set of democratic procedures, but it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a transition to democracy, irrespective of who becomes the next President. Elections are only one element of democracy, and to reduce democratic practice to what happens at the polling station is highly problematic. We need to ask ourselves what the conditions are that have influenced people’s choices? And to what extent did these restrictive conditions influence their choices? Have they been offered money or in-kind goods for their vote? Have they been given misinformation that amounts to deception about the different candidates? To what extent are people being mobilized along religious lines? Are you on God’s side or not?

How did Egypt end up with such a polarized scenario, caught between an old decadent rock and a very hard place? What went wrong? For the revolutionaries, the fact that Egyptians voted in such large numbers for Shafik (a former senior commander in the Air Force) is an insult to the revolution, and conspiracy theories of outside intervention have been rampant. However, let us not deceive ourselves, these are citizen voices – they are not all fullol, devotees of the old order, many were originally very sympathetic to the 25th of January revolution and went down to the squares to express their hatred of the Mubarak regime. Their vote for Shafik is not an indication of their yearning for the Mubarak regime, but for something else.

Talking to citizens on the streets, it is clear that there are now two pressing issues: security and economic well being. Since the 25th of January Uprisings, the police have staged a vendetta against the Egyptian people. Consequently, many Egyptians talk of infelat amny, a sense of security letdown, where gangs and thugs rule supreme, where police stations turn a blind eye to crime and where there are daily rumours of kidnappings of men, women and children. This sense of fear for one’s safety and that of one’s family is shared across all classes.

Full Article: allAfrica.com…: Egypt: Elections – a Choice Between Islamic Dictatorship and Military Authoritarianism.

Lesotho – the tiny mountain kingdom surrounded by South Africa, with the best (ok, only) skiing in Africa, and one of the world’s highest HIV infection rates – is getting recognition for something else: carrying out a peaceful election with a likely transfer of power. After elections held this week, a majority of Basotho voters turned against the 14-year rule of Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili, expressing frustration with empty promises. With no party enjoying a convincing majority, five opposition parties this week cobbled together Lesotho’s first-ever coalition government and claim at least 61 seats of the 120-member parliament – with an ex-foreign minister, Tom Thabane, tabbed as the new premier. With its straightforward process and absence of violence thus far, Lesotho gives a lesson in democracy that many other African countries — such as Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya, and even nearby Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and South Africa could learn to emulate, political observers say.

“If a sitting government actually leaves office gracefully, this will be a first for southern Africa,” says Nqosa Mahau, a coalition-government expert at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand, who advised the major parties here prior to the May 26 elections. “It will put Lesotho on the map for its democratic credentials – and set a tone for the rest of the region.”

Setbacks in African elections — notably the four-month civil war in Cote D’Ivoire in 2010, after the losing President Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down — have recently raised questions about whether democratic culture is actually taking root on the continent. Far too many elections feature heavy vote-rigging, intimidation, and sporadic bouts of violence, rendering the final vote count questionable in the eyes of election observers. Yet the election results in Lesotho shows that some African countries can hold world-class elections, even in a country with plenty of excuses for failure, including poverty, rugged terrain, and illiteracy.

Full Article: Democracy 101: tiny Lesotho holds peaceful election – CSMonitor.com….

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The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly May 28 – June 3 2012

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