The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly – December 19-25 2011

Attorney General Eric Holder

In a decision with significant ramifications for the 2012 election, the Department of Justice blocked South Carolina’s Voter ID law. Following a 16 month investigation, The Election Assistance Commission found serious defects in the ES&S DS200 digital scanners used in 2010 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Five of the seven leading candidates for the Republican presidential nominations have failed to meet ballot access requirements for the Virginia primary. A judge in Indiana has ruled that Secretary of State Charlie White was ineligible to run for the office in 2010 due to his inaccurate voter registration and ordered him removed from office pending review by the State’s Recount Commission. Concerns were raised by a video suggesting the possibility that results from next months Iowa caucuses could be hacked. Tens of thousands protested election fraud in Russia and accusation of vote-rigging and allegations of election fraud fueled opposition in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Egypt.

National: Justice Department Rejects South Carolina’s Voter ID Law | NYTimes.com
Ohio: Agency finds defects in ballot scanners — ES&S DS200 | USAToday.com
Virginia: Gingrich, Perry disqualified from primary ballot | The Washington Post
Indiana: Judge says White ineligible to serve as Secretary of State | Evansville Courier & Press
Iowa: Hackers Threaten Voting Systems, Electoral Process | eWeek.com
Congo: Opposition leader seeks army backing | Al Jazeera
Blogs: Thousands protest over alleged Russian election fraud | heyoya.com
Egypt: Accusations of ballot abuse flare up as Egyptians vote in 2nd round of parliamentary elections | The Washington Post

Dec 24, 2011
National: Justice Department Rejects South Carolina’s Voter ID Law | NYTimes.com

The Justice Department on Friday blocked a new South Carolina law that would require voters to present photo identification, saying the law would disproportionately suppress turnout among eligible minority voters. The move was the first time since 1994 that the department has exercised its powers under the Voting Rights Act to block a voter identification law. It followed a speech this month by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that signaled an aggressive stance in reviewing a wave of new state voting restrictions, largely enacted by Republicans in the name of fighting fraud.

In a letter to the South Carolina government, Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney for civil rights, said that allowing the new requirement to go into effect would have “significant racial disparities.”

He cited data supplied by the state as showing that there were “81,938 minority citizens who are already registered to vote and who lack” such identification, and that these voters are nearly 20 percent more likely be “disenfranchised” by the change than white voters.

South Carolina now faces the choice of dropping the proposed change or asking a federal court in the District of Columbia to approve the law.

Richard L. Hasen, an election law specialist at the University of California, Irvine, predicted on his Election Law Blog that the state would go to court, which could set up a “momentous” decision in the Supreme Court on whether a part of the Voting Rights Act that prevents states like South Carolina from changing their voting rules without federal permission is unconstitutional.

Gov. Nikki Haley denounced the decision, accusing the Obama administration of “bullying” the state.

“It is outrageous, and we plan to look at every possible option to get this terrible, clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th Amendment rights,” she said in a statement.

Full Article: Justice Dept. Rejects South Carolina’s Voter ID Law — NYTimes.com….
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Dec 24, 2011
Ohio: Agency finds defects in ballot scanners — ES&S DS200 | USAToday.com

The federal agency responsible for inspecting voting equipment said Thursday that a ballot scanner used in several key battleground states can freeze up without warning, fail to log errors and misread ballots. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission said the ballot reader, made by Omaha-based ES&S, is not in compliance with federal standards. And while it’s the first time the 8-year-old agency has taken such a step, it falls just short of decertification — a move that could force election officials to abandon the machines on the eve of the 2012 presidential primaries.

Read the EAC Report

The DS200 optical-scan system is designed to read paper ballots fed into the machines by voters themselves at their precincts. It’s used in all or part of Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York and Wisconsin.

The commission found three problems with the machines:

•Random screen-freezes that prevent ballots from being fed.
•Failure to log errors in a file that would let election officials know of problems.
•Skewing of ballots as they’re fed into the machine, making votes cast in some parts of the ballot unreadable.

ES&S responded in a statement to customers Thursday. “While we may not necessarily agree with all of the findings or recommendations within the report, we have nonetheless pledged our full cooperation.”

The commission first learned of the problems in a story in The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, which reported last year that 10% of the voting machines in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, had failed a pre-election test.

Jane Platten, the Cuyahoga County elections director, said the county had to switch to shorter ballot pages to fix the problems, and later reached a $208,197 settlement with the company. Later fixes offered by ES&S also led to system freezes, so the county went back to the previous, flawed software as “the devil we know,” she said.

Candice Hoke, a Cleveland-Marshall College of Law professor and an expert on voting equipment, credited local election officials for the rigorous testing that helped discover the problems. The logging issue, while seemingly technical, is a fundamental question of integrity, she said.
“If someone were to hack into the machine, if the logging is not secure and doesn’t protect it from rollbacks, that would allow someone to tamper with it and leave no trace,” Hoke said.

Full Article: Agency finds defects in ballot scanners – USATODAY.com….
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Dec 24, 2011
Virginia: Gingrich, Perry disqualified from primary ballot | The Washington Post

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry failed to submit enough valid signatures to qualify for the Virginia primary ballot, state GOP officials said Friday evening and early Saturday. The Republican Party of Virginia announced early Saturday that Gingrich and Perry failed to submit 10,000 signatures of registered voters required to get their names on the ballot for the March 6 primary.

“After verification, RPV has determined that Newt Gingrich did not submit required 10k signatures and has not qualified for the VA primary,” the party announced on Twitter.

The rejection is a significant setback for the Gingrich campaign since he is leading the polls in Virginia among likely Republican voters and is seen as a strong contender for the nomination.

Perry’s campaign told state election officials it had submitted 11,911 signatures, and Gingrich’s campaign said it submitted 11,050 signatures. State party officials spent Friday night validating the signatures.

Earlier Friday, the Republican Party of Virginia certified former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) to appear on the ballot.

The four candidates turned in thousands of signatures by the 5 p.m. deadline Thursday.

Full Article: Gingrich, Perry disqualified from Va. primary ballot — Virginia Politics — The Washington Post.

Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White’s two-front fight for his political life could be on its way to the state Supreme Court. A Marion County judge on Thursday ruled that White was not legally qualified as a candidate for the office he holds, and ordered that Democrat Vop Osili, the second-place finisher in the 2010 election, be installed in his place.

The ruling by Marion Circuit Judge Louis Rosenberg overturns a decision made by the three-member Indiana Recount Commission. That panel had ruled that despite controversy over his legal residence, White, a Republican, was eligible for the ballot.

Now, Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller’s office, which represents the Recount Commission, will ask the Indiana Court of Appeals to consider the case, and also place a hold on the ruling that would keep White in office while the legal process plays out. That court is the last step before the case would reach Indiana’s highest court.

“In all likelihood, the Indiana Supreme Court is going to end up taking this up and providing us all with some direction – which would be welcome, frankly,” said Tom Wheeler, who chaired the Indiana Recount Commission earlier this year.

Rosenberg’s decision sends the case back to the commission, which is a part of the secretary of state’s office, with instruction to remove White from office and install Osili in his place.

The steps the Recount Commission must take to deal with Rosenberg’s ruling get complicated.

Wheeler’s capacity, he said, is not quite clear. He was appointed to lead the panel when White, who would otherwise have been the chairman, removed himself. But once the panel made its decision, it – and his position – dissolved.

“It stopped as a matter of law. Right now there is no Recount Commission; there is no chair of the Recount Commission,” he said.

Wheeler, who was appointed by Indiana Republican Party Chairman Eric Holcomb to replace White, who would normally serve on the panel, said he would call for a meeting, which would require 48 hours’ public notice ahead of time, if he could.

Full Article: UPDATE: Judge says White ineligible to serve as Secretary of State | PDF » Evansville Courier & Press.

As the 2012 presidential campaign swings into full gear, there are concerns that hackers may target voting systems and Websites as a form of political protest. An apparent threat to hack into voting systems and disrupt the vote has the Iowa Republican Party on edge, according to the Associated Press.

The state’s Republican Party is boosting the security of the computer systems it will be using Jan. 3 for the first caucus in the 2012 presidential campaign, AP reported Dec. 19. Party officials were acting in response to a video posted on YouTube calling on Anonymous supporters to “peacefully shut down the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses” to protest the corrupt political system that favors corporations.

Investigators don’t know yet whether the threat is authentic and have not yet confirmed whether the Anonymous hacktivist collective is really planning any protests to prevent the vote. As a loose collective of like-minded hackers, Anonymous doesn’t have an official hierarchy or structure, making it very easy for a single person, or a select few, to claim an attack without most of the group’s participation or knowledge.

“With the eyes of the media on the state, the last thing we want to do is have a situation where there is trouble with the reporting system,” Wes Enos, a member of the Iowa GOP’s central committee, told AP.

Attackers may target the database used to gather votes and crash the Website that would publicize the results, AP reported. The party recently authorized additional security measures aimed at preventing attackers from delaying publication of the caucus results. Some areas in Iowa may use paper ballots instead of just a show of hands so that the results can be reconstructed if there are any problems.

The early caucuses and primaries are critical to the presidential campaign, with many candidates tweaking their campaign strategy based on their performance.

Security experts have long worried about the security of the voting machines and the infrastructure supporting elections. Researchers at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois hacked a Diebold Accuvote touchscreen voting system in September and managed to change voting results without leaving any trace of the attack. The researchers said their attack relied on inserting “alien electronics,” or a credit-card-sized device that cost about $10, inside the machine to give attackers remote access to the system.

An example of vote tampering would involve the voter making the selections, but with the attacker intercepting the final ballot when submitting it. The ballot could be recorded after a few items were changed, and it would be difficult to find any traces of which votes had been modified.

Diebold systems are used in several states, including Georgia, Maryland, Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas.

“In light of the rapidly approaching 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, it seems there may be a need to give serious attention to securing our election technology,” Cameron Camp, security researcher at ESET, wrote on the company blog. “Unscrupulous, well-heeled bad actors” can easily gather together a group of hackers, especially if they are politically motivated, to tamper with votes and swing elections, Camp said.

Last fall, a Washington D.C. district system invited a team from University of Michigan’s College of Engineering to try to breach its pilot of an online voting system. It took the team only three hours to find a SQL injection flaw to take over the server, change ballot results, cause the site to broadcast the university’s fight song when someone accessed the site, and find personal information of voters registered on the system.

There have been several opportunities for cyber-attackers intent on influencing the political process in recent weeks around the world. During the Russian elections earlier this month, popular Russian media Websites such as the Moscow Echo radio station, an election monitoring group Golos, and the LiveJournal blogging service were knocked offline by distributed denial of service attacks. A botnet using a piece of malware was behind some of the distribute denial of service attack (DDoS) attacks, according to Sebastien Duquette, a researcher at ESET.

The DDoS attacks targeted Websites that were discussing election fraud and other political violations, Moscow Echo’s editor in chief claimed.

It’s a plausible scenario as “true political activism is a strong and real motivator for Internet DDoS attack activity,” Mike Paquette, chief strategy officer of Corero Network Security, told eWEEK. “It is not hard to imagine that fringe groups, loosely associated with one political party, might employ these cyber attacks to generally, or specifically help their party in certain elections.”

Full Article: Hackers Threaten Voting Systems, Electoral Process — Security — News & Reviews — eWeek.com….

Congo’s top opposition figure has urged the armed forces to obey him after losing elections he says were fraudulent. Etienne Tshisekedi said on Sunday he would offer a “great prize” to anyone who captured President Joseph Kabila.

A close aide to Kabila dismissed Tshisekedi’s comments as showmanship and said the opposition leader had made similar calls against former President Mobutu Sese Seko that had been ignored by the people. However, the veteran politician’s comments do threaten to escalate a row over the results of a November 28 presidential contest, which international observers say lacked credibility.

“I call on all of you to look for [Kabila] wherever he is in the country and bring him here alive,” Tshisekedi said in his first news conference since official figures showed he was soundly beaten by Kabila. “If you bring Kabila here to me you’ll receive a great prize,” he said, urging the armed forces to obey the country’s “legitimate authority”.

The president, who was thought to be in Kinshasa on Sunday evening, has broad support within the military, even though his rival is strongly backed by Kinshasa residents. The election was meant to put Congo on a path to greater stability after decades of turmoil, but has instead deepened divisions. Around 20 people were reported killed in clashes before and afterwards as opposition supporters took to the streets accusing the government of vote rigging.

Observers have said the poll, Congo’s second since a 1998–2003 civil war that killed more than five million people, was marred by irregularities, though Congo’s election commission has said any problems did not affect the ultimate outcome.

Full Article: Congo opposition leader seeks army backing — Africa — Al Jazeera English.

The exact number of protesters present is unknown; estimates for the Moscow protest vary from twenty thousand to one hundred thousand, and rallies on a more minor scale also took place in other Russian cities—including Saint Petersburg. Voice of America (VoA) reported the demonstrations as the largest pro-democracy protests since Vladimir Putin came to power eleven years ago. Other reports describe the demonstrations as the greatest since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Police estimated that ten thousand people were present at demonstrations in St. Petersburg. Corruption and a rejection of Putin were the most commonly-cited grievances from questioned protesters.

Opposition leader Evgenia Chirikova told VoA the protests were in favour of fresh elections, and the release of political prisoners. During the demonstrations, protesters chanted “[p]olice, part of the people” at the riot police. Echo of Moscow host Alexei Venediktov described the protesters as “the new generation, the Putin generation”. These people “voted, had their votes stolen, and now they want a fair system”, said Venediktov.

Konstantin Kosachyov, a United Russia parliamentarian, dismissed the concept of discussions with the protest organisers. “With all respect for the people who came out to protest, they are not a political party,” he stated. Student Daniil Klubov, a leader of the St. Petersburg rally, told the BBC that he does not “belong to any political movement” and is “just a student who is tired of all these lies”.

Last week, Russian police arrested an estimated 1,600 people after street protests. In anticipation of yesterday’s protests, fifty thousand police and riot police were drafted into Moscow. Under one hundred arrests were made across the country during the day of protest.

Television stations operated by the Russian government provided no coverage of protests in Russia from last week’s election, but lifted the blackout one week on, broadcasting images of thousands filling a Moscow park, spilling over a bridge and covering a facing embankment.

On Friday, Moscow authorities declared an obligatory test for all high school students, scheduling it for the exact time of protests on Saturday; protest leader Alexey Navalny is currently imprisoned by order of a Russian judge. And, a Russian health board warned of respiratory diseases being contracted when being in large crowds. Russian Ground Forces cautioned that they would be observing, looking for instances of draft evasion as protesters walked through metal detectors.

Although United Russia were declared victors in last Sunday’s polls, the percentage of votes in their favour decreased significantly—down from 64% to 49%. In March next year, Putin himself will face voters, seeking a new six-year term as Russian President. VoA reported last week that his presidential bid looked likely to succeed; however, that outcome now seems less predictable.

Source: Thousands protest over alleged Russian election fraud | heyoya — have it your say.

Islamists and liberals accused election officials Thursday of filling out ballot forms for elderly or confused voters at some polling stations during the second round of parliamentary elections. If confirmed as a pattern, the reports could chip away at the credibility of what has so far been the freest and fairest vote in Egypt’s modern history.

Under Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year regime, elections were systemically rigged and the corruption was a major impetus behind the popular uprising that ousted the authoritarian leader in February. But as the polls closed, it was still unclear how widespread the problems were.

The head of the election commission, Abdel-Moez Ibrahim, described the allegations of wrongdoing as “a strong wave of rumors which aimed at driving wedge between the judges and the people.” He said he investigated some incidents and found out that judges overseeing the voting were helping disabled, illiterate voters. But because of the accusations, judges now tell voters asking for help that this is not their role.

“If people lose confidence in their judges, this will lead to a state collapse,” he said. It was difficult to say how widespread any abuses or irregularities were, but more allegations surfaced in this round than in the previous one in November as competition heats up.

Full Article: Accusations of ballot abuse flare up as Egyptians vote in 2nd round of parliamentary elections — The Washington Post.

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The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly – December 19-25 2011

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