Collaborate Disseminate
Election workers facing unprecedented harassment are retiring in huge numbers, posing a threat to the U.S. voting system.
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In a party-line vote, House appropriators voted to slash funding for the Election Assistance Commission and scrap federal election security grants.
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The bills are aimed at protecting election integrity from the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.
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The Preparing Election Administrators for AI Act is a companion bill to Senate legislation that will be marked up Wednesday.
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The Election Assistance Commission on Wednesday voted to adopt the first comprehensive update to its voting system security guidelines in more than 15 years, concluding a lengthy process that ended with a mixed reception from some election security experts. The security community largely greeted the update as a security upgrade to standards that most states rely upon at least partially for their own equipment testing and certification. A significant number of academics, activists and even some in Congress, though, voiced displeasure in particular for how the so-called Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 would handle wireless connections on voting systems. The update stands to shape the next generation of voting systems that election vendors produce for use around the country during a period of sinking trust in the electoral process. Regardless, the more than five-year drafting process and resulting EAC vote won’t immediately transform election security because states, equipment manufacturers and […]
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Attorney General William Barr declined to endorse a desperate effort by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to overturn Trump’s electoral defeat by seizing voting machines. Barr said at a press conference Monday that he had not seen evidence of widespread fraud that could change the result of the election, and that there was “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government.” He also rejected the idea of naming a special counsel to investigate voter fraud allegations. States have certified their results in the election, which saw Joe Biden win by more than 7 million in the popular vote. Election security officials have declared the election secure. Claims of widespread voting irregularities made by Trump’s lawyers have been roundly rejected in court. Giuliani nonetheless last week pushed Ken Cuccinelli, a senior Department of Homeland Security official, to confiscate voting machines, the New York Times and Wall Street […]
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As Americans await the results of a heated presidential contest, election officials are in the spotlight in a country on edge. They are trying to sift through a fog of domestic misinformation, and their methodical process for counting and verifying ballots is belying demands to hurry up, or stop. Now, security experts say months of extraordinary preparation during the coronavirus are paying off. After months of explaining how elections would work during a pandemic, state and local officials are projecting confidence to the public by being open about their work. Election officials have “transformed some of the challenges associated with COVID into opportunities to increase transparency and election administration education,” said Liz Howard, senior counsel at the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Before the election, when many election officials received calls and questions from voters about their absentee ballot security measures, many offered to provide tours of their offices to the […]
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Trust the process. That’s the message from a group of election security experts who, during a virtual panel discussion at CyberTalks, said they are working to safeguard the 2020 election from an array of cybersecurity threats. Benjamin Hovland, a commissioner on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Jack Cable, an election security technical adviser at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Matt Masterson, a senior cybersecurity adviser at CISA, explained that the goal isn’t only to protect the Nov. 3 election, but also to ensure that the American people can trust the results. The CyberTalks panel was led by John DeSimone, vice president of cybersecurity, training and services at Raytheon Intelligence and Space. In a series of questions, DeSimone, probed the election security experts on the ways that U.S. government entities and the defense industrial base are working together “from a mission assurance perspective” to protect […]
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Election officials and nonprofit security advocates on Wednesday announced a pilot program for testing and verifying voter registration databases, election night reporting and other systems meant to support voting. The pilot program will focus on making the software that’s used in election systems more secure as it is developed, and before it is deployed. The aim is to close a gap in security testing for the broad set of election infrastructure outside of voting machines, which are already the subject of voluntary federal security guidelines. “There is no standard process for verifying that non-voting election technology is secure, reliable, and usable,” said the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which is spearheading the pilot program. “Existing election technology verification processes are costly, slow, and disincentivize updating products at the same pace as technology changes and security threats.” Under the pilot program, election systems vendors will submit their products to CIS for testing. […]
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The Department of Homeland Security has told election officials and voting vendors that internet-connected voting is risky to the point that ballots returned online “could be manipulated at scale” by a malicious attacker. The advisory that DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent states on Friday is perhaps the federal government’s sternest warning yet against online voting. It comes as officials weigh their options for conducting elections during a pandemic and as digital voting vendors see an opportunity to hawk their products. While the risk of election officials delivering ballots to voters via the internet can be managed, the return of those ballots by voters “faces significant security risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of voted ballots,” CISA said in the guidance, which CyberScoop reviewed. “These risks can ultimately affect the tabulation and results and, can occur at scale.” The guidance, which is marked “For Official Use Only” and […]
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